Album Review: Distracted by Thundercat
Sober and still scattered, Thundercat swaps Flying Lotus for an Adele producer and sounds more like himself than ever.
Somebody at Brainfeeder had to cosign the idea of handing ten tracks to Greg Kurstin, the guy who produced “Hello” for Adele, who’s worked with Paul McCartney and Beyoncé, and letting him shape an album by the label’s most unruly bass player. Every previous Thundercat solo record was executive-produced by Flying Lotus. Four albums, twelve years of sessions that ran crooked and fusion-heavy, wandering off into jazz tangents for minutes at a time. On Distracted, FlyLo contributes just two songs. The rest belongs to Kurstin, with one-offs from Kenny Beats and The Lemon Twigs.
Stephen Lee Bruner told The FADER that the pairing clicked fast: “Greg is an astounding musician and an amazing producer and would become a good friend also through the process. He probably thinks I’m crazy as hell.” Six years passed between this and It Is What It Is. In that gap, Bruner got sober after fifteen years of heavy drinking, lost over a hundred pounds, started boxing, and described the last album as something that “just took a second to try to come back in the room a bit.” He calls this version of himself Sober Steve. Sober Steve, it turns out, still has a lot to say about not being able to function.
Mac Miller’s appearance on “She Knows Too Much” is the kind of thing you can’t manufacture in a studio in 2026. It was recorded before Miller died in September 2018, sat in a vault, leaked, and eventually got finished with the Miller Estate’s blessing and Kurstin’s help. Mac leads the song, and he’s not sanitized. He bounces between wanting this woman and resenting her, offers to take her from an apartment to a penthouse, gets explicit about what he’s after, then snaps:
“You can talk about the universe and energy
But all you really want is a celebrity.”
He catches himself right away. “Man, that was a little harsh,” he mutters in the interlude, before adding, “You’re just lost/But I’m here to find you.” The whole thing swings between crude and sweet, and Thundercat mostly stays off-mic, playing bass underneath. It Is What It Is ended with Thundercat calling out “Hey, Mac” into dead air and Mac’s voice answering with a single “Woah.” That was an open wound. This is different. Mac is reckless and present and funny on “She Knows Too Much,” and hearing him talk shit to a woman he clearly likes is a stranger kind of memorial than any elegy could be.
Half of Distracted is Thundercat apologizing to women and making himself laugh about it at the same time. The clearest example is “I Did This to Myself,” where he asks what she’s doing after work, spends a full stanza admitting he’s been made a fool chasing her attention—wonders if he reminds her of her ex, asks why he’s paying so much—then adds under his breath, “(But you gotta admit, she’s a bad bitch).” Lil Yachty shows up and takes the comedy to a stranger, meaner place:
“The more that I look in your face, you look like your dad
And it’s hard picturin’ him with a big ol’ ass.”
“Pozole,” produced by The Lemon Twigs, ditches the jokes entirely. Thundercat starts with “I can only show you exactly who I am,” spends two rounds asking whether showing himself even matters, and finishes with the question flipped inward: “Who am I?” The plunge from confident confession to total blank is quick and not played for laughs.
Thundercat’s most specific writing about daily dysfunction shows up on “Great Americans,” which structures itself around a full day of falling apart. He wakes up burnt out, his “cat brain” sending mixed signals. By midday he’s still not answering calls, conversing with his pets, vacuuming the same carpet and getting nowhere. By nightfall he’s pacing in circles, hasn’t completed a single thing. The outro rewrites the hook into an SOS, ending on two words that cut harder than anything else on the track: “I’m undiagnosed.” “A.D.D. Through the Roof” works the same anxieties with more warmth, reminding whoever’s listening (maybe himself) that butterflies inside are just proof you’re still kicking. He explained to SPIN that distraction was tangled up with his alcoholism: “I think that was one of the reasons why I would drink so much. It helped me focus, even though that sounds absolutely abhorrent and absolutely opposite.” The album’s title comes from that admission, the idea that sometimes you have to be scattered to pay attention at all.
The best lyric on the album might belong to “What Is Left to Say,” a Kenny Beats production co-written with The Lemon Twigs:
“Feelings are like children in a car
You can put them in the trunk, but let them drive, you won’t go far.”
And then, in the same breath, a nerdy deflection: “These aren’t the drugs you’re looking for, go on your way.” That whiplash between real observation and Jedi joke is Thundercat in a sentence. “Anakin Learns His Fate” commits to the Star Wars metaphor without winking, comparing himself to someone whose partner has painted a monster in her mind and blaming fate for the fallout. The love material on Distracted is warmer and goofier than anything on his last two records. “Walking on the Moon” piles up space-movie references (Barbarella, Uhura from Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Event Horizon) with the sincerity of a guy who grew up on anime and sci-fi and now uses that vocabulary to describe being close to someone. Kevin Parker takes the chorus on “No More Lies” about being alone and dancing alone, with the resignation of someone who’s been touring too long. A$AP Rocky on “Funny Friends” flips casual enough to disappear into the song’s shrug: “Don’t say goodbye, them words is way too lethal.” WILLOW duets on “ThunderWave,” and “This Thing We Call Love” with Channel Tres is the loosest thing here, two people in a room, no rush, Thundercat kicking someone around “like Messi.”
Kurstin’s production gives these tracks more oxygen as pop structures than FlyLo’s weirder arrangements ever would have. And Thundercat sounds fine with that trade. He’s not veering into six-minute codas on Distracted, but writing about overthinking, about burning breakfast because he forgot to text someone back, about apologizing wrong, about someone who left without saying goodbye. The persona that made Drunk a cult favorite—stoned virtuoso goofing off between grief—has been swapped out for something plainer and harder to dismiss. A sober 41-year-old chatting with his cats, running the vacuum over nothing, asking if maybe he should start an OnlyFans and show some feet. The jokes are still constant, but they’re not hiding anything anymore.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “She Knows Too Much,” “What Is Left to Say,” “Great Americans”