Stephen Bruner grew up in a serious music household in Los Angeles — his father was a drummer who played with Gerald Wilson — so the instrument fluency was baked in early. He was playing professionally as a teenager, and by his early twenties he was the bassist for Suicidal Tendencies, which tells you something about his range right away. A Black kid from LA playing thrash metal at that level before pivoting to soul and jazz fusion is a resume that doesn't fit neatly into any box, and Bruner has never seemed especially interested in making it fit.

The Thundercat project really started clicking when he connected with Flying Lotus and the Brainfeeder label in the late 2000s. That relationship matters a lot to understanding the records. Flying Lotus pushed him toward something stranger and more fragmented than straight soul or straight jazz, and Thundercat responded by leaning into that weirdness fully. The early albums — The Golden Age of Apocalypse (2011), Apocalypse (2013) — are dense and a little overwhelming on first listen. There's a lot happening harmonically, the songs shift shape unexpectedly, and Bruner's falsetto sits in this uncanny zone between vulnerability and goofiness. That combination either grabs you immediately or takes a few listens to settle.

His bass playing is genuinely unusual. He favors a six-string bass and uses it more like a guitar in the chordal sense — voicings that would feel at home on a Herbie Hancock record from the mid-seventies, but run through a sensibility that's been shaped equally by video games, anime, and late-night LA studio sessions. When he's laying into a groove it's thick and funky in a very physical way, but he can pivot mid-song into these floaty, harmonics-heavy passages that feel almost harp-like. It shouldn't all cohere, but it does.

Drunk (2017) is the record that most people point to, and for good reason — it's the most fully realized version of the Thundercat thing. Short songs, some barely over a minute, strung together into something that feels like a fever dream of grief and humor. The album was partly a response to the death of his close friend Mac Miller — no wait, that's not right. It was connected to the death of Austin Peralta, a pianist in their LA circle. The grief is real but it never turns maudlin, because Bruner keeps cutting away to something absurd or playful before the weight gets too heavy. That tonal tightrope walk is probably his most distinctive skill.

He's been involved in enough high-profile projects — To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) by Kendrick Lamar being the biggest — that his reputation as a collaborator is rock solid. But the solo records are where you hear what he's actually after. The bass playing is the hook, but the songwriting is what keeps you there. He writes about loneliness, loss, cats, anime, being a mess — ordinary stuff, rendered in an instrument language that sounds like nothing else currently being made.