In Funk We Trust

THUNDERCAT’S FIFTH ALBUM DISTRACTED PAIRS VIRTUOSIC FUNK WITH AN INSTINCT-LED RESPONSE TO OVERLOAD, FINDING CLARITY, AND GROOVE WITHIN THE NOISE.

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

“OOH, ELECTRIFYIN', MESMERISIN’ / WOO" — He may not have known it at the time, but the dearly departed Mac Miller was, in that fleeting moment, appraising the very project he was stepping into. His voice—light and unbound—threads through Distracted, the fifth and latest album by Thundercat (birth name: Stephen Bruner), as a spectral presence and earthy echo.

He's not alone. A constellation of collaborators—A$AP Rocky, Tame Impala, WILLOW—glides through the record, each lending shape to a body of work that feels at once expansive and intimate. At its centre is Thundercat himself: bass in hand, instincts aglow, reconfiguring funk into something spurning gravity and superlatively distinct.

Six years to the day his prior album It Is What It Is was released, Distracted arrives in a world that feels louder and faster, where ephemera weighs on the mind ad claustrophobium. “I think that the important things in life right now are very mixed in with the insanity of the Internet,” Thundercat tells me. “It's very hard to differentiate between things that are important versus things that are just stuff.”

The signal is there, somewhere, but it flickers.

EVERYONE, EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE

The noise isn’t the problem. It’s the way it rearranges life’s meaning.