Thundercat: The Long Game
One of the world’s most sought-after bass players and an experimental force in his own right, Thundercat has spent 25 years in the hyper-productive zone. As he gears up for his next act, he’s channelling the wisdom gleaned from his friend Mac Miller and his beloved boxing regime to stop forcing it and trust the process.
Torrential rainstorms happen so infrequently in Los Angeles that, when the sky does occasionally unleash a downpour, inertia grips the city. Rather than brave slick roads, Angelenos defer their plans. But when uncharacteristic swells of thunder and record-shattering rainfall swept the region in late November, the bass superstar Thundercat trudged on, keeping to his training regimen at a spacious boxing gym in North Hollywood, in between watching season three of SpongeBob SquarePants.
“I try to train every day,” Thundercat tells me one late morning over Zoom, sounding a little bleary-eyed. “It’s not suggested, but I do.” Sometimes his management will tell Thundercat, né Stephen Bruner, that he should take it a bit easier with the boxing so he can truly unwind. “And I’m just like, ‘This is me relaxing,’” he says, belly-laughing. “Me punching is, really, me relaxing.” Given how sought-after he is, Bruner has to seize these rare moments of repose – or right hooks, rather – whenever they come.
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Thundercat has lived a multitude of lives, each of them seismic. He has become the concentric circle uniting a bevy of disparate, thrillingly experimental LA scenes over the past 25-plus years. He and his childhood friend, the virtuosic composer-slash-saxophonist Kamasi Washington, played together in a high school jazz quartet in south Los Angeles, and they won the John Coltrane Music Competition at the 1999 edition of the festival named after the jazz giant. He has long collaborated with Steven Ellison, better known as the producer Flying Lotus, and continues to release albums on Ellison’s LA-based Brainfeeder label. For a spell, he also thrashed in the seminal underground band Suicidal Tendencies, playing alongside his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr. Possessing falsetto pipes, a mischievous sense of humour and a knack for irreverent, springy bass interventions that have undergirded some of Kendrick Lamar and Erykah Badu’s albums, as well as Tyler, the Creator’s 2024 album Chromakopia, Bruner is one of our greatest – and most in-demand – living bassists. (Even a newly reunited Spinal Tap enlisted him as one of the bassists playing Big Bottom on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this year.)
Although Bruner has stayed busy since releasing his last studio recording, It Is What It Is, in 2020, he has been more concerned with finding balance than with album cycles. Hence his penchant for boxing. Though the sport has visceral connotations, Bruner finds it a grounding force rather than a necessary release. “People think that you go train and you’re getting some aggression out,” he says. “You have about 30 seconds of that, where you think you know what you’re doing, and then you realise you don’t know how to breathe. Then you realise your legs are weak. Then you realise all it takes is one punch. And then you realise a lot of it is mental.”
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Bruner has taken to boxing on an elemental level. He relishes the training, but also “the hardships, the high points, the low points”, as he describes it. Boxing keeps him steady, calm under pressure and “able to look things in the face”. He considers this complex dance an art – one that’s not so different from playing bass. “Nothing makes up for time spent,” he says of both disciplines.
Boxing could not have arrived in Bruner’s life at a more opportune time. The gifted bassist released It Is What It Is – a meditative collection of songs ruminating on the destructiveness wrought by drinking, the loss of close friends, romantic woes and his beloved cats, which went on to win him a Grammy Award for Best Progressive R&B Album – at the height of the pandemic. He is still recovering from the “traumatic” experience of that weighty album, and its aftermath, five years later. By way of explaining where his head has been at since then, Bruner brings up a critical scene from the late-90s cult-classic workplace comedy Office Space. In it, the protagonist, Peter Gibbons, is hypnotised and cannot wake up, which leads him to let go of his hang-ups about his miserable job and live in a state of suspended disaffection – an attitude that, conversely enough, helps him begin to climb the corporate ladder.
“That’s what happened after the process of that last album,” Bruner says, referring to a state of hypnosis. “After the last album, life had a way of sitting me down, regardless of what I felt.”
I ask if he feels he is out of that hypnotic state now. “Um, no,” he responds, his voice dropping slightly. “I feel like I’m forever changed from that last experience.”
Alongside his rigorous boxing routine, he’s gone vegan and quit drinking in recent years – the latter of which he also wrestled with on Drunk, his breakthrough 2017 solo album. Bruner believes that enduring this fraught period is ultimately leading him somewhere better. Yet adjusting to this new reality has not been without its hurdles. “I’m a different person entirely from who I was, so being OK and comfortable with that, and trying to trust the process, became a big part of my functionality,” he explains. “Because things were very unrecognisable for a second, if I’m honest.”
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Lately, he’s been thinking about something he and his friend, the late rapper Mac Miller, would talk about. “Me and Mac used to have a saying that we had on the studio wall, on a piece of paper. It just said, ‘Sit down and let it happen,’” Bruner says. “So in a respect, that became a thing for me. In order to change your life, you have to sit down and let it happen. And I think I’ve held on to that for the last few years.”
This hard-won mentality has reshaped Bruner’s working dynamics and filtered into some of his more recent songwriting, particularly the single I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time. Released in autumn, the woozy track – his first Thundercat release since hooking up with Tame Impala for 2023’s No More Lies – sees Bruner reflecting on the exact moment things unravelled with a lover: “I thought that everything was fine, so wrong,” he croons. The single’s accompanying video is a jarring cartoon number featuring Bruner’s brain leaping in and out of his skull. For a brief instant, Bruner’s animated alter ego peers inside this squishy tangle of grey matter – a nod, perhaps, to how Bruner has been sitting with his thoughts, probing them in ways he hadn’t done before. “I feel less weirded out, or less threatened by the unknown,” he says. “I keep my hands and my mind open. I try to lead with that.”
“Me and Mac used to have a saying that we had on the studio wall, on a piece of paper. It just said, ‘Sit down and let it happen’”
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Another of Bruner’s recently released songs, Children of the Baked Potato, especially resounds as a testament to how far he’s come with this distinct mindset. A collaborative venture with the vocalist Remi Wolf, the song takes its name from a longtime jazz club in North Hollywood founded by Don Randi, a keyboard player who also moonlighted as a member of the Wrecking Crew – the celebrated troupe of session musicians who lent orchestral touches to songs by the Beach Boys, the Ronettes and other legendary groups. As a child, Bruner would visit the Baked Potato with his parents, both musicians who played there regularly. One of his earliest memories involves them frantically searching for him inside the pint-sized club, famous for its mammoth baked potatoes, after he’d fallen asleep inside a bass drum case. Later on, Bruner found himself returning to the Baked Potato again and again as close friends, including the late jazz pianist Austin Peralta, played at the storied jazz haunt.
The frenetic, funk-grazed tune, anchored by Bruner’s signature rubbery bass, is a bridge between eras. It simultaneously nods to this formative place in Bruner’s musical upbringing while acting as an autobiographical ode to his life at this juncture: “They say being alone can be a dangerous place/ But I’m having way too much fun/ On my own when it’s all said and done/ I did it for my health,” he sings, with nods to his cherished homebody life of playing Call of Duty and hanging with his cats rather than going out. For Bruner, the song goes back to the ethos of being OK where he is, even if that means fighting the urge to be hyper-productive at all times. “It’s like, ‘Don’t worry.’ Just because you want to sit around… there will be no shortage of bullshit to deal with,” he says.
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Yet even Bruner’s most pensive projects are fuelled by his humour, which skews sombre and absurdist. What drives him as an artist is “fear, anger, the dark side of things”, he deadpans. The real answer, he says, is actually laughter and comedy. “I think that the joke keeps me going,” he chuckles. “And in that joke is also tragedy. So it’s one and the same for me.” Consider how he recently covered Diana Ross’ Upside Down as part of an interactive video with the gaming behemoth Candy Crush – a natural fit for Bruner, a dedicated gamer. When I ask Bruner what kind of video game he’d create if given the opportunity, he’s swift to answer: “Breakup simulator. I think it’s a turn-based game where it’s like, the way you break up, it can end really badly based on the choices you make.” He almost can’t get the words out because he’s laughing so hard.
“Oh my god, breakup simulator is insane!” he chortles. “What was that Dungeons game where it was like the choices you make lead to different endings? Like, your breakup can land you in jail, or [you could] be best friends still. You guys started a band together, so now you’re broken up but you’re still in a band together, and then you have hit records. And at the end, you can turn into Fleetwood Mac.” Later, when pressed about what he has left to do as an artist, he offers a similarly cheeky retort: “Die. Maybe start working on my own underground bunker? I don’t know. Join the breakdance summit with Raygun in hell?”
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When he isn’t riffing on forward planning or settling in for a Call of Duty marathon, Bruner remains musically omnivorous. He name-checks recent releases by PinkPantheress, Charlie Puth, Mustard and Steve Lacy as having moved him, alongside the Brazilian mandolin player Hamilton de Holanda. He loves that hardcore and thrash bands, like Turnstile, are currently flourishing in the zeitgeist. “Things like punk and thrash are important for our culture,” he says. “It’s part of our story, just like jazz is.” As always, his sonic intrepidness is shaping his next act, which includes live dates in 2026 that may bring something a little different to the stage. “I’m working on that,” he says of his stage show. “Simply put, I’m open to change, which is a thing in itself.” Bruner seems equally malleable to trying new things in his songwriting, though what that might mean is a mystery even to him. “I’ve always only played bass,” he says. “I don’t know what the future holds when it comes to sound for me and things like that, but I’m very open.”
But right now, enjoying some calm before another inevitable storm, there are plenty of other SpongeBob seasons yet to be watched. Two sweet cats need their ears tickled and to be shooed from the countertops. And the boxing gloves stay on. Bruner is content to take his time and let his artistry develop further – a revelation that has also taken him a while to realise.
“I think that as an artist, it’s important sometimes to have nothing to say so you can sit and take things in,” he says. Often, “you don’t get a chance to be quiet, sit and be bored, sit and get an idea and let it lead you somewhere, because a lot of the time it’s already laid out there for you. The moments of said quietness, or the moments of emptiness in said fluidity, have just allowed a better ability to process for me.”
Thundercat tours the UK and Europe in March and April
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