The most telling decision on Distracted isn’t a guest appearance or a lyric. It’s a production credit. For the first time in Thundercat’s solo career, Flying Lotus isn’t running the sessions.
Greg Kurstin, who produced Adele’s ‘Hello’ and reshaped Beck’s late career, handles the majority of the album, and the effect is audible in every chorus that resolves cleanly, every bassline held in place rather than sprawling outward. Six years after It Is What It Is, Stephen Bruner returns sober, sharper, and somewhat safer.
On the tracks Kurstin shapes, the production is meticulous – warm synth pads sitting at a fixed distance, drums offering rhythm rather than disruption. ‘Candlelight’ opens on DOMi Louna’s gliding synths and JD Beck’s restless kit, the album briefly feeling like it might veer off anywhere.
Mostly it settles. The back half finds a mid-tempo plateau where the bass – usually Thundercat’s most argumentative instrument – retreats into background warmth. ‘Walking on the Moon’ has genuine sci-fi romantic sincerity, but the percussion is nearly absent, the bass barely registers, and the track ends without having started much of a conversation.
What prevents Distracted from being merely well-produced is the handful of tracks Kurstin’s instincts couldn’t fully tame. ‘She Knows Too Much’ was recorded with Mac Miller before his death in 2018 and completed, years later, with his estate’s blessing. Miller’s performance is unguarded – funny, a little cruel, catching himself mid-thought. He delivers one line that lands like a small shock: “You can talk about the universe and energy / But all you really want is a celebrity.” Immediately: “Man, that was a little harsh.” Thundercat stays largely off-mic, running the bass beneath warm saxophones and soft Rhodes. After It Is What It Is ended with Thundercat calling Miller’s name into silence, having him back present and unpreserved feels like a different kind of tribute entirely.
‘I Did This to Myself’, produced by Flying Lotus, is the album’s rhythmic argument: off-kilter bass slapped against Lil Yachty’s warbling flow, two and a half minutes of real friction. ‘A.D.D. Through the Roof’ runs on the same engine, bass and keys in call-and-response over a compact groove. These two tracks make the more managed material feel like a deliberate trade, and you find yourself wondering what the album might have sounded like without Kurstin’s hand on the wheel. Probably stranger.
There’s a running joke on Distracted about technological disappointment – Star Trek promised laser fights and delivered better phone cameras – and it inadvertently describes the album itself. Kurstin smooths over the same productive chaos Thundercat is mourning in the lyrics. A$AP Rocky on ‘Funny Friends’ and Willow on ‘ThunderWave’ come and go without quite inhabiting the room. But the closer, ‘You Left Without Saying Goodbye’, strips everything to a bare jazz ballad under two minutes long, arriving at the grief the album spent 45 minutes circling. Worth the wait, largely. Worth all of it, intermittently.
