THUNDERCAT - Distracted

Candlelight

Burning, oh, so bright

Burning at both ends

Fighting the wind

Don't let your light fade

The lyrics of "Candlelight" immediately hand us the question to ask after listening to "Distracted", the new album by Thundercat, released five years after "It Is What It Is": why does Stephen Bruner keep so stubbornly blowing out candles the moment they're lit, making incompleteness his own stylistic signature?

It's a seemingly secondary question once you get into the songs of an album designed to bewitch the listener and carry them off into a parallel universe, through remarkable fusion-tinged bass lines, smooth-soul passages, funky echoes and elaborate samples, at times impossible to pin down - with the exception of "You're Getting A Little Too Smart" by the Detroit Emeralds, clearly sampled in "Anakin Learns His Fate" - yet one that inevitably resurfaces further down the line.

Let's try, though, to get to the bottom of it somehow. If the guests attempt to sidestep that partiality - starting with "No More Lies" featuring Tame Impala, brought in to make an already lunar ballad even more dreamlike, and Mac Miller, at work in the funky flourish of the following "She Knows Too Much" (which, truth be told, sits very much in line with Anderson Paak's recent output) - and further down the bill with the likes of Lil Yachty, A$AP Rocky and The Lemon Twigs, respectively answering the call on "I Did This To Myself", "Funny Friends" and "What Is Left To Say" - the latter in particular sounding as if it were lifted straight from a Lionel Richie record - then in the moments of solo flight, the Los Angeles bassist, who once again chose his friend Steve Ellison's Brainfeeder label, works instead purely by subtraction, ending up sketching out little studies of pure neo-soul candor in which chorus and verse play hide-and-seek throughout ("Wish I Didn't Waste Your Time", "Anakin Learns His Fate").

Thundercat is thus at once sparkling yet elusive, whimsical yet also hazy. And in this continuous shifting of perspective, there's often the risk of losing sight of the horizon. Listening, for instance, to a track like "ThunderWave", put together with WILLOW, the feeling is exactly that of being swept along by a wave (and indeed there's no shortage of watery sounds emphasizing the effect) that never quite breaks.

The piano moments too highlight this constant evaporation ("Pozole"), and by the end of it all you find yourself having appreciated the hints of melody, the shifts in rhythm, the exotic atmospheres, yet unable to recall a single blessed tune. Which can be perfectly fine in a work put together by a musician as technically and conceptually sophisticated as Thundercat, but it's nonetheless a price that can't be ignored, because while in the past this tendency had its own organic logic, the excessive parade of guests alternating with solo passages this time around creates a bit too much dispersion.

"Distracted" is therefore the classic take-it-or-leave-it record. An album that brings to mind Montaigne's famous maxim, "We know what we flee, but not what we seek", ironically echoed by Massimo Troisi in the script of "Ricomincio da tre", here applied to Thundercat's approach, since across the fifteen tracks of "Distracted" the most in-demand Grammy-winning bassist in the Los Angeles scene drifts cheerfully (and distractedly, indeed) through his soul-fueled fantasy world with absolutely no idea where to dock. Repetita iuvant: take it or leave it.

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14/04/2026