Man On The Moon: Thundercat Interviewed | Features

After a period of prolonged creative ennui, the Los Angeles musician unveils his fifth album – a work that searches for order and grace in dissonant times.

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Stephen Lee Bruner is enjoying being outside again. Known by the masses as the time-travelling virtuoso and bassist Thundercat, who transitioned from a protean session musician to a front-facing artist in the early 2010s, Bruner has returned to his native Los Angeles after a week-long jaunt in Paris. He’s up early for our transatlantic chat, waxing lyrical about the Rick Owens show that brought him to tears.

“I was just really grateful to be thought of at all on this trip,” he tells CLASH. “It was fun seeing friends and sometimes my friends were surprised I was there. Fashion week is exactly what it seems like: absolute chaos. For the person who loves it, like me, it feels fantastic.” Bruner likens the churn of trend-setting fashion showcases to the flow of inspiration that guides and informs his music-making process. “Things are always being made new, ideas are always being pursued, inspiration is always bubbling.”

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Born in Compton, Los Angeles to a musical family – his father was a drummer, his mother a flautist and percussionist, and his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., has gone on to play with everyone from Kamasi Washington to Snoop Dogg – Stephen Bruner’s early years included a stint with the metal band Suicidal Tendencies, a precursor to his collaborative work with Flying Lotus, his cousin Terrace Martin and the aforementioned Washington. Together they shaped and strategically guided the beat scene renaissance in the West Coast. It’s no surprise Thundercat anchored Kendrick Lamar’s coming-of-age masterstroke, ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’, his free-wheeling jazz excursions bringing the Southern California metropolis to life. A predominantly African-American region, it’s been the backdrop to Thundercat in every iteration of his life and work thus far.

“In all honesty, L.A. is kind of like an ever changing landscape and anything that is lucky enough to stay is a beautiful thing because everything is constantly on the move and evolving,” he says. “I always say it feels lucky if things get the chance to get old here. Los Angeles is crazy as hell but it’s always been a part of my personal backdrop, my history.”

Bruner enjoys taking detours in conversation. He’s always been curious about out-there oddities and cultural ephemera. He’ll entertain a conspiracy theory (“Sometimes I think we’re aliens and we act like absolute trash sometimes. I think it keeps the mind open; the things we keep wanting to know keeps us young and excited”), venerate the next big bassist (“Mohini Dey is a monstrous young lady. Her ability is beyond reason. She’s a force to be reckoned with”), and extol the virtues of National Geographic in the span of a few breathless minutes. 

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Bruner’s not one to over-explain his art but he does value musicianship and community, gushing about his peers releasing in an age of extreme market saturation, with a limitless supply of songs uploaded daily. “A$AP just dropped a nuke on everybody,” Bruner says of Rocky’s long-gestating comeback project, ‘Don’t Be Dumb’. He’s featured on the three tracks, and joined the rapper onstage for his SNL debut a few weeks ago. “Denzel Curry is about to put out an album with TiaCorine; he’s talking about how whack things have gotten. I’m excited for the waves of music becoming good again. I’m excited for any artist that has something to say right now. Bless every person who puts something out there.” 

In this foggy post-genre epoch, Thundercat charts his hinterland with new album ‘Distracted’, a masterstroke of a record made under duress. Bruner withdrew after the release of his Grammy-winning full-length, ‘It Is What It Is’, in 2020, and writing for the record only began in earnest after the pandemic, when Bruner had the opportunity to pause and mine through the trauma he’d long been burying. He found solace in the stillness, practicing sobriety and taking up boxing as a cathartic exercise. “I felt like I had to learn how to walk again,” he says of his creative nadir, likening it to a bout of depression. “It was gradual. I had to walk slowly back into things. Nothing felt the same, it felt very hard to dig round my head creatively.”

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“Part of me knew that I needed to sit down and process what had happened in my life. I don’t think that would have been allowed if I had been going on tour constantly. It took some pulling out of me,” he continues. “In a world where artists aren’t allowed to take a moment to think, you almost do have to step back. It’s what Miles Davis said: sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play. It feels like a metaphor for my life. When I look back I’m grateful for the time and space.”

Beyond the release of collaborations with the likes of Gorillaz, Channel Tres, Justice and more in the intervening years, Bruner opted out of a biopshere that reduces working artists to useful conduits and transmitters; to be bought, exploited and controlled. “The landscape of the world has changed in a way that is invasive, and that absolutely extends to music. I’m okay with people disconnecting from me and my work,” he says. 

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On ‘Distracted’, you’ll find the usual Thundercat hallmarks: the space-hopping deviations (“I’ve always had a fascination with space, underwater and the great unknown…”), the zany character studies, romantic dissolution realised through acidic sketches, and the genre-mutating sense of whimsy that cycles through genres like yacht rock, sosphisti-pop, twilight funk, disco, and house, with cinematic flair.

There’s sonic depth behind the sci-fi conceptualism: ‘ThunderWave’ features WILLOW’s diaphonous tones over a celestial melodica notes; ‘Funny Friends’ with A$AP Rocky is mellow gold soft rock blown up to apocalyptic scale; ‘What Is Left To Say’ is a swoonworthy Wall of Sound overture with sugary-high harmonies. For Bruner, each song represents an integral part of his emotional spectrum. “It’s hard to pinpoint one feeling on this record because I’ve experienced everything from acceptance, self-loathing, extreme highs, extreme lows. It felt maddening at times, like Clockwork Orange,” he explains.

‘Distracted’ may lurch between styles and eras, but the songs feel more holistic; bigger, bolder and more centred. Bruner enlisted veteran producer Greg Kurstin to give his nebulous sound a pop sheen. Take ‘Walking On The Moon’, a love song realised through folktronic production, co-created with Kurstin and Beck. The latter compelled Bruner to rein in the metaphorical melodrama for something more direct and true-to-life.

“That experience was hilarious,” Bruner laughs. “Beck said quite clearly that we’re not writing any songs about my cats or weird stuff. He told me to talk about how I felt. So I closed my eyes and imagined walking on the moon in this never ending love story. It gets harder to feel as time progresses and you get those moments when you can’t really breathe in space or underwater. So maybe coming up for air is the pain. When you’re there sometimes it’s a magical place.”

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Unlike previous efforts, there’s a feeling of slowly encroaching digital dread coursing through ‘Distracted’. Bruner’s dubious about technological innovation and mindful of the way it distorts and deforms our tether to reality: “That’s the joke. It’s true when they say it’s impossible to interact with all this information being passed through our heads all the time.” On the track, ‘I Did This To Myself’, Bruner and Lil Yachty bemoan the loss of a potential paramour to the algorithm; connections reduced to missed signals and empty voice notes, a relationship unable to progress into anything meaningful because we’re all “just too busy”. It’s a song that pops and fizzes with internet-fuelled idioms, brought to life by a natural fluency between longtime co-creators.

“This song is pretty friggin ‘funny,” Bruner shares. “Our ability comes from years of working together and knowing how to bring things out of each other. When I’m singing I don’t know what is going to come out. It can be anything from funny to painful but I allow myself to feel it. Yachty knew exactly what to do, he knew what the feeling was, and he knew exactly what the implications of this song were.”

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Bruner toyed with the album titles ‘It’s Okay Mom, I Didn’t Die’ and ‘I’m Alright Mom, I promise’, before settling on a word that captures the latent effects of overstimulation, the seriousness of living in a heavily-surveilled world, and the need to offset these real-time concerns with humour and playfulness. The title ultimately honoured the lateral ways in which Bruner created the record. “‘Distracted’ felt true to what life is for me,” he explains. “It’s not necessarily a bad connotation because I have to be distracted to focus sometimes. If I think too hard on something I keep messing it up but when I’m not thinking is when it comes naturally. It felt very true to who I am and what the process can be to me.” 

“It’s really complicated to keep up with the world we live in today,” Bruner continues, lamenting contractual obligations by labels ordering next-gen artists to be omnipresent: online and always available. “It’s a sacrifice. Nothing makes up for time spent on doing what you want to do and what you want to be. It sucks that there is a camera in front of you all the time. Resilience comes from hard work. It’s a different set of obstacles from what I had to deal with, that’s for sure.”

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Where ‘It Is What It Is’ explored the phantom effects of grief, created in the wake of the sudden loss of longtime friend and collaborator Mac Miller, ‘Distracted’ charts the bittersweet process of learning how to press forward without pretending the loss didn’t happen. Miller appears on the restored song, ‘She Knows Too Much’, a number the pair recorded in Malibu a few years before Miller’s untimely death. Here Bruner celebrates their abiding friendship in a warm, homespun tale made for the summer. “It’s always been important to honour him,” Bruner says. “It’s that simple. He’s one of my best friends and this was one of the lasting pieces of work that we created together. We knew it would go somewhere but we didn’t know where.” 

Of his live shows in Europe this Spring, Thundercat wants to amplify the core message at the heart of ‘Distracted’: that there is no substitute for levity and escapism, even in trying times. As much as his work takes on the banality of our fragmented times, there is joy, resilience and adventure to be found, and harvested.

“Sit with it and live with it. As one does,” he concludes. “There are some funny, sad and sombre moments, but it’s about what it means to process. Processing can be traumatic, it can be confusing but it can also be affirming. I say: feel it all.”

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