The last line of Thundercat‘s new album Distracted arrives the way most of his best moments do: delivered in a silky falsetto, draped over sparse bass plucks and keyboard drenched in reverb, and completely committed to its own absurdity. He is not being ironic. He is not performing irony for an audience that will appreciate the wink. He is, as he has always been, just himself. That is the tension at the center of this record and also its greatest strength.
Distracted works because Thundercat is one of the few artists working today who can make the contradictions in his personality feel like a feature rather than a flaw. He is an accomplished musician with the technical range to record serious jazz excursions, the kind of artist who could spend an entire record exploring harmonic complexity and receive critical acclaim for doing so. Instead, he writes pop songs about Star Wars plot lines, about blowing money on women who are into crystals, about the gap between who he wants to be romantically and who he actually is when the feelings hit. He is sincere. He is messy. He is a charming dork with a bass guitar and very few filters. The album is better for all of it.
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The collaborations are central to what Distracted is, and most of them pull in the same direction. “She Knows Too Much” features posthumous vocals from Mac Miller and opens with a funk break worthy of a serious crate dig. Miller’s performance is loose and nearly lackadaisical, which is exactly right for the material. He is not impressed by his love interest. He is indifferent to her, almost dismissive, and his delivery reflects that without needing to announce it. Thundercat’s bass playing throughout is among the best on the album, and his backing vocals carry a warmth that offsets Miller’s cool detachment. The second half of the track opens up into a tasteful piano solo and the whole thing holds together in a way that posthumous features rarely do.
The exception to the album’s cohesion is “No More Lies,” a Kevin Parker collaboration that sounds less like a Thundercat record and more like a Tame Impala one from the opening piano strike. The lava lamp bassline, the psychedelic haze over the keyboards, the general atmosphere of sun-bleached introspection: it is all Parker, and by the time Thundercat steps to the microphone the song has already established itself on another planet. It is also genuinely great, featuring some of his catchiest vocal melodies and a lyric so self-deprecating it loops back around to endearing. The tension between how wrong it feels on the tracklist and how right it sounds on its own terms is the kind of problem you forgive because the song refuses to let you hold a grudge.
Where the album reveals its limits is in the songwriting. Thundercat is clearly invested in the craft of the pop song, specifically the love song, and that investment is genuine. But his musicianship carries more weight than his lyrics on most of these tracks, smoothing over lines about feelings you feel inside and ham-fisted space metaphors with enough sonic warmth that you are inclined to let them pass. He is more Rick James than Smokey Robinson, which is not an insult. Rick James made great records. He just made them on different terms than Robinson did, and Thundercat has not fully reckoned with which one he actually is. The goofiness he layers over the weaker results is a coping mechanism as much as a stylistic choice, and it works more often than it should.
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What saves Distracted from its own inconsistencies is the fact that Thundercat is constitutionally incapable of being boring. The record moves with a personality that is specific enough to be irreplaceable. Nobody else is making music that sounds like this, or for reasons that feel quite this personal and unguarded. It is an imperfect album made by someone who cannot help being exactly who he is, and that authenticity is its own form of craft.
