It is an overcast Thursday afternoon at the end of January, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to interest Snoop Dogg in the mid-70s oeuvre of Frank Zappa. He wasn’t Thundercat then, he explains. He was still Stephen Bruner, bass player for hire, who had fetched up in what he calls a “stupid-as-hell, Rick James-level band” backing the venerable rapper, packed with Los Angeles jazz luminaries who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin. Alas, their jazz chops were sometimes deemed surplus to requirements. At one point, while Bruner was playing an expansive bass solo on stage, Snoop sidled up to him and flatly announced: “Ain’t nobody told you to play all that.”
So perhaps it was in the spirit of horizon-broadening that Bruner took it upon himself to play Snoop the song St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a knotty, marimba-heavy slice of jazz-rock from Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe, which switches time signatures three times in less than two minutes, and features lyrics about a man stealing margarine and urinating on a bingo card. “Yeah, I hit him with the rollercoaster,” Bruner chuckles. “He was smoking, and he almost ate his blunt, saying: ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said: ‘My sentiments exactly.’ I think I did a cartwheel after that and left the band: I played Snoop Dogg St Alfonzo’s Breakfast, my job is done here, I have no more work to do.” He thinks for a moment. “Or maybe I got fired: ‘Get out of here dude, you’re too weird.’ I forget. It was a great moment.”
In London, January 2026. Photograph: Ollie Tikare/The Guardian; Assistant: Eddie Davies
This, it becomes apparent as we attempt to discuss his forthcoming fifth album, is a very Thundercat kind of anecdote, involving one of the impossibly eclectic cast of musicians he has worked with over his career: he is presumably the only person in history who can claim to have played with Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, and to have been in an early 00s boyband (No Curfew, briefly big in Germany) and the gnarly thrash metal institution Suicidal Tendencies. You get the impression he wasn’t terribly happy as a member of the former: “I’m a working-class musician, man, and that was what it meant for me at the age of 14”. He spent nine years in the latter, however, powering his way through songs called Widespread Bloodshed and We’re F’n Evil. (It’s worth noting that he was also working with Erykah Badu at the same time.)
Playing with the thrash-metal band Suicidal Tendencies at Hammerfest, Prestatyn, in 2010. Photograph: Metal Hammer/Future/Getty Images
He looks puzzled when I ask if he can think of any musical situation in which he would feel uncomfortable playing. “Whatever brain disposition that lets you know you’re in a dangerous situation, I don’t think I have,” he says, shrugging. “I think constantly performing has allowed that to not be such a problematic thing to me. What’s that saying? ‘Luck is just preparation met with opportunity’?”
In addition, the Snoop story also involves a dramatic and improbable collision of genres, very much Thundercat’s stock in trade. He says his transition from multipurpose sideman to solo artist in the early 2010s felt strangely natural to him, maybe because the music he started making was as strange and eclectic as the list of artists on his CV. His solo albums to date have piloted a wildly zigzagging path between funk, jazz-fusion, electronic pop, yacht rock, hip-hop, psychedelia, punk and chiptune, among other things, all of it lavishly decorated with the kind of extravagant bass solos that so upset Snoop Dogg.
It shouldn’t really work, but it does, perhaps because the bizarre stylistic cocktails never seem forced, but a natural extension of his impossibly catholic tastes. Over the course of our afternoon, he goes from enthusing wildly about Leon Ware’s mid-70s masterpiece of sophisticated soul Musical Massage, to explaining the Lydian mode, to demonstrating a clearly encyclopaedic knowledge of the work of Chick Corea, to earnestly discussing the “really innovative” oeuvre of Limp Bizkit. He thinks his musical tastes are down to his parents, both musicians – his dad drummed with the Temptations – and ardent believers that categorising music was just a marketing tool, an idea that clearly seeped in on a very deep level. By the time he was a teenager, he was as enamoured of Slipknot and Korn as he was of the Billy Cobham and George Duke albums his parents played, or the jazz artists he and Washington were sneaking in, underage, to see in LA clubs.
Clearly Thundercat is a pop star unlike any other, although you don’t need to know his backstory to work that out: you just have to look at him. Today in London, despite having recently landed from LA, he is dressed in typically head-turning style: voluminous corduroy trousers, shirt featuring a kind of 19th-century military brocade, trainers decorated with metallic skeleton toes, and dip-dyed dreadlocks held back from his face by a pair of enormous silver grips featuring snarling tigers. Perhaps worried that this might look insufficiently arresting, he has accessorised with a huge metallic breastplate bearing the logo of the cartoon alien felines from whom he took his name. He is an obsessive fan of cartoons, comic books and science fiction and peppers his conversation with references to manga and video games, a couple of them so obscure that I have to look them up when I get home.
Whatever brain disposition that lets you know you’re in a dangerous situation, I don’t think I have
He tells me that his “greatest moment ever” was getting a cameo role as a man with a robotic hand in the Star Wars TV series The Book of Boba Fett. “I can use that in an argument every time somebody gets too high and mighty: ‘Hey, you can’t talk to me like that, I was in Star Wars!’” he nods. “It wasn’t one of those never meet your heroes moments. You can’t ruin Star Wars for me. Certain characters and certain principles it was created off are timeless, they still stand. The struggle between dark and light, what is considered dark and what is considered light; the Force, which is like flatulence basically.” He notes my baffled expression and smiles. “It’s all about how you choose to use it, man. Maybe as a weapon.”
Stephen Bruner as the Modifier in The Book of Boba Fett. Photograph: Capital Pictures/Alamy
But he hasn’t stopped off in London to discuss Star Wars. Bruner has a new album, Distracted, which seems to be head-spinning business as usual: smooth soft-rock piano ballads abut house tracks, A$AP Rocky raps over a beat that owes as much to shoegaze as to hip-hop, while both Lil Yachty and defiantly retro indie duo the Lemon Twigs are also in the supporting cast.
Not for the first time in his career, the eclecticism is so diverting that it’s initially easy to miss how fraught and downcast a lot of the songs are: 2011’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse mourned the drug-related death of his friend and collaborator Austin Peralta; his 2017 breakthrough Drunk probed his problematic relationship with alcohol, while Distracted’s predecessor, It Is What It Is was consumed with grief over the death of his “best friend”, rapper Mac Miller.
I’ve heard putting out an album being compared to postpartum depression
He says It Is What It Is was particularly difficult to make – “There was a lot of trauma linked to it, a lot of pain” – compounded by the fact that it was released at the height of lockdown. “I’ve heard putting out an album being compared to postpartum depression – you have such an attachment to this thing because of how much you obsess about it, then you put it out and then there’s this kind of weird feeling of loneliness. And because of fucking Covid, It Is What It Is came out to complete silence, like: drop the album and go sit in darkness, see if you can amp the pain up some more.
“There was a lot going on at the time that album came out, and just having to sit with it, I couldn’t … I would almost, like, vomit at the thought of it. But ultimately, when I look back, I’m very grateful for the chance to have sat down, because to have to go on stage and deal with it night after night, say goodbye to my friends over and over again, would have been another traumatising experience.”
Thundercat at FYF Fest 2017 in Los Angeles. Photograph: Rich Fury/Getty Images
Instead of touring, Bruner took stock. He gave up drinking and took up boxing training with such dedication that “even my trainers wonder what the hell I’m doing sometimes: ‘Hey, are you training for a fight or something?’” He gives a mordant chuckle. “I’m like, ‘You mean world war three, because that seems to be on?’”
He says the new album is “a bit of a diary, my thought processing”, and it seems to relate to the soul-searching he did in the aftermath of the release of It Is What Is. There are songs about his capacity for self-sabotage, about failed relationships, about his suspicion that some of his more erratic behaviour might be the result of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although he isn’t diagnosed. “I think that it’s a byproduct of the environment, as most sicknesses are,” he says. “We got cell phones, we got microtransactions, you use your brain in 30-second bursts, and you’re going to adjust to that even if you don’t want to. And even if it was something you could get diagnosed, it’s like, I’m 40 years old, and I didn’t die so far. And I know not one creative person whose brain isn’t of that nature. It comes with the territory. So I guess it’s somewhere along the lines of a superpower.”
The album also returns to the late Miller, who appears on She Knows Too Much, a track the pair recorded in Malibu some years before Miller’s death. No, Bruner says, it wasn’t weird returning to the recording and hearing his late friend’s voice booming around the studio again. The tracks that address Miller’s death on It Is What It Is were consumed by an almost paralysing misery: “So hard to get over it, I tried to get under it, I’m stuck in between,” he sang on the title track.
‘Stand still too long, somebody’s going to hit you with something’ …Thundercat. Photograph: Ollie Tikare/The Guardian; Assistant: Eddie Davies
But She Knows Too Much – a buoyant funk-fuelled track that finds Miller in his first flush of mega-fame, reflecting on his new celebrity in witty, earthy terms – offered a reminder of when they made it. “It was the funniest shit ever,” says Bruner. “It was hilarious, I remember it viscerally. I like to describe Mac almost like he was a one-man Rat Pack. When I would see him, I would somehow feel like we were supposed to be wearing suits. Like weird, highbrow bullshit and shenanigans. And tomfoolery! That’s what we were up to. It’s just a clear picture of who we were.”
Bruner says Distracted is “the sound of me choosing happy”. If it occasionally sounds troubled or downcast, well, “choosing happy is a hell of a process”.
And, indeed, he does seem happy, joking about his new album having to compete with Cardi B – “I got to get myself a fatter ass, I got to get a BBL” – enthusing about a forthcoming visit to Paris fashion week.
It’s weird, he says: for all the changes that his career has gone through, it doesn’t feel that different from his early days when he was playing weddings or, later, in Suicidal Tendencies. “My main memory is thinking if I stood still for too long, I’d get hit with a beer can. I think the same principle applies. Actually, I think that principle applies to every stage of life: stand still too long, somebody’s going to hit you with something.”
With that, he shakes my hand and heads off into the London dusk, breastplate clanking a little as he goes, heads understandably turning as he passes.
Distracted is released 3 April on Brainfeeder. The single I Did This to Myself (ft Lil Yachty) is out now