Thundercat: Claws Out
On his new album ‘Distracted’, Thundercat - the acclaimed bassist, sought-after collaborator, and cultural iconoclast - is joined by Tame Impala, Mac Miller and A$AP Rocky as he takes on the social media age. It’s a complicated portrait of an artist facing up to a strange time in his life - and an even stranger time in the world at large.
Thundercat is thinking about alternative sources of income. “Overworked, underpaid is how I mostly spend my day / Maybe I should start an OnlyFans and show some feet,” he coos at the very end of ‘You Left Without Saying Goodbye’, the final song on his latest studio album, ‘Distracted’.
Speaking to him today in a Kentish Town studio, it seems prudent to inquire after the logistics of this new venture, and whether he plans to launch his softcore porn career off the back of his existing brand, or bear his toes anonymously. “I mean, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to hide my feet,” he sniggers. “I have these tattoos - I’m getting identified immediately.”
Although he neglects to show us IRL, it’s fair to say this checks out. By his own standards, our meeting finds him dressed down; the man known to don Pikachu backpacks, colourific kimonos and Dragonball durags is today clad in a black turtleneck, black trousers, and thick black shades. But still, every inch of exposed skin is inked with some design: pawprints on his palms; the logo from the cartoon that inspired his nom-de-plume on the backs of his hands; and heaven knows what else beneath his long sleeves. So, we surmise, his pivot into the world of feet pics wouldn’t exactly be a quiet one, likely instead to be marked by his signature style: Thundercat, the bassist who shows feet.
Then again, such a side hustle might not be necessary. Thundercat, née Stephen Bruner, is a double Grammy-winning, virtuosic bass-playing auteur with four acclaimed albums already to his name. He’s worked with Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, Gorillaz, Bruno Mars, Herbie Hancock, Mac Miller, Ariana Grande and Spinal Tap. In 2020, Rolling Stone named him on a list of the 50 greatest bass players of all time - and his star has only risen since then. Yet on ‘Distracted’, his fifth solo album, he often sounds frustrated with his lot. Does he really feel underpaid? “Um, yeah,” he says. “With streaming? Of course. I’m very grateful for everything that’s come my way, but you should always be getting paid more for what you do. I would hope that for anybody.”
He’s lived a storied life, growing up in and around LA in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as the city and its surrounding neighbourhoods emerged from the chaotic “gang-banging era” that took the lives of so many young Black Americans. His mother was a flautist and his father a drummer who played with Gladys Knight, The Temptations and The Supremes. Both his siblings are professional musicians too, and a photograph exists of a nappy-wearing baby Thundercat (Thunderkitten?) sitting at a miniature piano while his older brother bangs a drum and cymbal. He got his break playing bass in the thrash-punk band Suicidal Tendencies, before plucking strings as a session player for Erykah Badu and Snoop Dogg. He launched a solo career in 2011 aided by friend, record label boss and kindred spirit Flying Lotus. Every album since his debut has been bigger and more critically adored than the last.
On ‘Distracted’, Thundercat reckons with the attention-deficit age; it’s a treatise on internet culture and hyper-connectivity delivered by an artist who sounds conflicted in his views on both the world around him and the galaxy inside his head. (Modern culture, he observes, often revolves around [the idea of] “how far you can put the camera up your ass.”) Musically speaking, he’s as accomplished as ever, crafting rich baths of heavenly noise around the complex basslines that wiggle from his fretboard. A prime case in point is ‘Pozole’ - named after a type of Mexican stew, the track is a work of celestial vocal harmony redolent of The Beach Boys’ ‘The Smile Sessions’, on which Thundercat croons: “Does it even matter if I showed you who I am?” before repeating the refrain “Who I am… Who I am… Who am I?”
So, who is Thundercat in 2026? “Who am I? I’m a rooting, tooting son of a gun,” he replies, typically. “No. Um. Who am I now?” He tries on a new voice. “I am Stephen. I play the bass.” That won’t do either. “I don’t know, I’m just… I mean, you’re always learning stuff about yourself. I think I know for sure [that] who I am is not who I was a very short period of time ago.”
‘Distracted’ features yet more A-list collaborators, including Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky and his late friend Mac Miller - stars who achieved mainstream success before TikTok and AI took over our daily lives. Was that a better time for humanity, in his eyes? “It had its pros and cons, but I think there [were] a lot of pros, because you weren’t overwhelmed,” he muses. “You could learn about something without having to know everything about it already. Now, [the internet] is like turning the faucet on full blast every time - extremely cold or extremely hot. You can’t find what feels good. Do I think it’s better? I think it’s just different. Because [during] the time before that, everybody thought weed was the devil, rock’n’roll was the devil, comic books were the devil.”
Like Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Thundercat often sounds at war with himself in his lyrics, constantly torn between his new and former selves - as if even his own reflection appears out of date by the time he looks in the mirror. “If I could only show you what goes on in my mind / You can see how hard it was to leave the past behind,” Thundercat sings elsewhere on ‘Pozole’, almost uncannily echoing Parker on last year’s ‘No Reply’ (“I apologize for the no reply / Wish I could describe what goes on inside”).
Thundercat credits Tame Impala’s early work as being foundational to him as he grappled with adult life, but, despite the inner turmoil the two of them express on record, he asserts that they share a lightness in their approach to the world. “He’s comedy,” Thundercat nods. “He’s every bit as Australian as you would think - he might as well not have shoes on all the time. [I] love him to death; I feel like we have similar personalities. As in: ‘ooh, squirrel!’ That’s Kevin Parker in a nutshell.”
He may have a heaving address book, but humility seems to be a cornerstone of Thundercat’s work nevertheless. And of all his collaborators, one in particular left him awestruck. “Kendrick,” he affirms, immediately. “It would almost blow my mind because it was a light that came from within him. Some people wear the hat of a rapper. Some people embody the spirit of a rapper. Some people are trying to keep up. Kendrick just exists. Kendrick is like a well; he knows how to, where to, when to, why to…” While working on the bassline in ‘Mortal Man’, the closing track on Kendrick’s magnum opus ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’, Thundercat says that, just from listening, Kendrick could hear exactly what he’d been through, and understood the last few months of the bassist’s life simply from the notes he was playing. “I’m not going to tell you what was happening in my life, but… Kendrick can just see. He can see. That’s a gift that’s otherworldly.”
Three months after ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ landed in 2015, Thundercat released ‘Them Changes’, a funk-laden single complete with a heart-rending video in which a Samurai loses both his arms. It’s possibly the most recognisable track in his oeuvre. “I didn’t even know that ‘Them Changes’ went viral,” he shrugs, true to the jaded persona he portrays more than a decade later on ‘Distracted’. “My daughter called me one day [saying]: ‘people are really talking about this!’. And I replied: ‘I don’t know what that means’.”
‘Them Changes’ is a bop, a jazz-imbued ditty that gets catchier and more difficult to resist with every listen. But it also tells the story of a bitter breakup: “Why in the world would I give my heart to you / Just to watch you throw it in the trash?” he chirrups in one verse. ‘Distracted’ strikes a similar balance between supremely danceable grooves and oblique lyrical references to unsuccessful romance. “This monster that you’ve painted in your mind sounds amazing / Controlling how you feel is not my job,” he sings on ‘Anakin Learns His Fate’ - a song named after Star Wars’ much-maligned second trilogy’s even-more-maligned protagonist.
“It’s a tragic hero’s tale,” Thundercat explains. “It’s not so much about me as us, you know? Anakin’s story was so special and unique. Everybody has their different ideas of how he was such a terrible character. No, no, no, no, NO. I saw George Lucas explain it simply one time: it wasn’t anything other than Anakin’s job to bring balance to the force. A lot of the time, the role he played would confuse people, which is why people tended to hate him. But the reality is, he was the best good, and then he became the worst worst.”
You get the impression he could speak for hours on the subject - the product of a lifelong obsession that recently culminated in a brief acting role in John Favreau’s spinoff series The Book of Boba Fett. The week after our conversation at a show in Bristol, Thundercat launches into a passionate speech about various upcoming Star Wars releases immediately before playing his franchise-inspired track. “Who’s excited about the Darth Maul series?!” he yells to a not-quite-as-enthusiastic crowd.
His fans’ zeal soon ramps up, however, as the song reaches its breakdown and Thundercat reels off his umpteenth bass solo of the night, his fingers racing up the neck of his custom six-string Ibanez, sounding like Anakin’s podracer as it flies across Tatooine, or your brain as you flick through unrelated TikToks at mind-melting speed. Behind him sits an inflatable cat the size of a house. “If you had told my 10-year-old self that I’d get to walk out of a cat pyramid…” he beams, his delight audible from the other side of the river Avon.
An artist who is even more impressive live than he is on record, Thundercat is undoubtedly one to see before you die - and, ideally, before you arrive at any fatalist conclusions about the sorry state of the world right now. Like much of his music, ‘Distracted’ is another example of this gifted maestro finding ways to have fun in spite of it all. And if that doesn’t do it for you - well, just keep an eye out for his OnlyFans.
‘Distracted’ is out now via Brainfeeder.
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