Thundercat is the bard of absurdist masculinity. His career is a comic character sketch of a certain sort of dude: one who loves Mortal Kombat and named his cat after Tron; whose childhood changed course when he found out about Goku; who goes to Tokyo and buys a suitcase worth of anime; who simultaneously flees and clings to girlfriends. That his ascent coincided with the mainstreaming of nerdom and the heyday of the fuckboy was a stroke of luck, but the bassist and singer born Stephen Bruner knows that men’s hypocrisies and failures are timeless fodder for songwriting. The jittery guys in his music just want love, hopefully from someone who doesn’t butt into their Diablo sessions too much. His risible evocations of this brand of male psyche exposes emotional paralysis like a raw nerve.
Distracted, Thundercat’s fifth album, dives headlong into resignation—a supremely 2026 sentiment. The characters in these tracks, both wounded and calloused, have been sapped of giving a shit. They endure breakups but learn nothing from them, and watch their lives float on as if they’re not at the helm. Take “No More Lies,” its slippery chorus courtesy of loner-in-chief Tame Impala. Thundercat relinquishes his investment in a romance but won’t leave it behind: “Love is a two-way street/I’m letting go because both of us don’t need to drive,” he sings in his trademark high falsetto. He predicts that the connection will eventually “crash,” and consoles: “But it’s not your fault/I’m just kind of an ass.” Thrusting us into a rut of unhappy relationships and fried interpersonal logic, Thundercat animates the frazzled labor of maintaining a socially acceptable face. “This mask is just for you,” he sings on “Anakin Learns His Fate,” and underneath the music’s surface is a frantic churn of synthesizers, percussion, and überquick basslines. A crash feels inevitable when this raucous party turns paranoid halfway through: the attendees were just pretending not to feel desperate and exhausted.
Thundercat’s last full-length, 2020’s It Is What It Is, had a similarly downcast mood, but its palette was also subdued and languorous. Distracted works so well because it resembles a pop blowout at first, only to pull the shag rug out from under our feet. Willow Smith, A$AP Rocky, Lil Yachty, Channel Tres, and Mac Miller drop in for guest spots—the last thanks to a collaboration that Thundercat excavated from before Miller’s 2018 death. Jazz’s reigning speed-trial champions, DOMi & JD Beck, offer their prodigious chops on opener “Candlelight,” while elsewhere the legendary Beck Hansen and former child star Haley Joel Osment deliver backing vocals. The guest list is VIP-only—as Thundercat memorably ad-libs, “I live in L.A., sweetie, what do you expect?” Distracted balances its celeb soiree with Southern California’s sinister edge, the malaise and monotony that can make sunny days so alienating.
Some of the guest verses feel superfluous on otherwise glorious, upbeat cosmic funk. The sinew between Thundercat and Tame Impala is thick and obvious—one reason that Bruner doesn’t need ubiquitous Kevin Parker’s lethargic laments. Mac Miller’s rich-boyfriend brags on “She Knows Too Much” feel like freeze-frames of the last decade (“Living in an apartment/I could take you to the penthouse”), and the track is most fun when Bruner trails his bars with accenting harmonies. The famous buddies thin out as Distracted continues, one reason for its overweening mood of loneliness.
On the slower, thoughtful B-side, Thundercat sweeps up the record’s shattered heart and, instead of reassembling its parts, puts his characters in a bigger mess. The narrators of these songs are trapped inside their habits, aware that the inertia of their personalities is too strong to be moved by another person. “I can only show you exactly who I am,” Thundercat sings on the soaring “Pozole,” over an airy vocal accompaniment worthy of the Beach Boys. By the second verse, he relegates this claim to the past tense, and by the song’s end, he gives up: “Does it even matter if I show you who I am?” Thundercat plays both world-weary adult and needy man-child, describing an embrace on the poignant “Walking on the Moon” as “amniotic.” The album’s ideal love is anesthetic, a script for surviving daily chaos and tragedy that doesn’t require reciprocation. And, briefly, he gets drawn in by infatuation’s “tractor beam”—as he calls it. “ThunderWave,” an earnest if doomed love song, boasts the LP’s most successful feature: Bruner melds his voice with Willow Smith’s, their vocal melody cresting in surprising, repeated unison.
The phenomenal trio of sad-sack tracks that conclude the record trap us inside a brain—a neurodivergent one on “A.D.D. Through the Roof,” and another on “Great Americans” that barricades itself from the outside world, using pets, chores, and the internet to ignore an imploding love affair. Over a beat that clicks like a kitchen timer, Thundercat sings, “I’m talking to my cats/I keep vacuuming and nothing’s getting clean.” The men he writes about act feline themselves, demanding attention and then darting away when another person extends a hand. Closer “You Left Without Saying Goodbye” finishes with a non sequitur, an avoidance tactic: “Maybe I should start an OnlyFans and show some feet.”
Thundercat forges a fresh perspective on what it means to be independent, to be an individual, qualities that art generally celebrates. These are not points of pride on this record, but grim conditions that become their own cages. As he bemoans on “Great Americans,” “Everything I do is a learned behavior.” This might be fine for a cat; Distracted grapples with what it means to be human.
