Thundercat

“All I ever wanted to be was funky and funny,” Stephen Bruner once told The New York Times. “That’s it.” Count it, then: Across five albums as Thundercat since 2011, Bruner has emerged as an alien bassist able to move at hyperkinetic speed and a ribald songwriter capable of turning lines about OnlyFans photos of his feet or leaving his wallet at the club into surprising psych-soul fodder. Bruner was born into a musical Los Angeles family, his father having worked with the likes of Diana Ross and Gladys Knight and his mother having played flute and percussion. It was through his father that he met the saxophonist Kamasi Washington; though Washington’s junior, Bruner entered an ambitious jazz-funk-soul enclave that included Flying Lotus. He was energized simply by playing together, by the nerdom that being a music obsessive entailed.

For a spell, Bruner was a frustrated sideman, his dazzling bass runs often too much for the stars he stood alongside. But Erykah Badu encouraged him not only to play what he felt but also to begin thinking of himself as an actual artist, as Thundercat. The albums that emerged during the next decade were hilarious and uncanny, Bruner able to make pop out of fancy basslines and manifold references to anime obsessions and masturbation. But after the death of his confidant Mac Miller in 2018 and the end of a relationship that had nearly led to marriage, Bruner got clean and reflective, funneling his feelings into 2020’s transitional It Is What It Is and 2026’s sprawling Distracted, an album where jokes and sadness, existential blues and delightful playing commingle in tracks that feature Tame Impala, Willow, and even a salvaged Miller cameo. It is funky and funny, ways not for shrugging off the sadness but for carrying its weight onward.