Thundercat

Six years on from It Is What It Is, Stephen Bruner got sober, lost a hundred pounds and started boxing. Sober Steve turns out to be just as scattered as the old one, only now he's running the vacuum over the same patch of carpet at midnight and feeling it. The big change is Greg Kurstin taking the controls for most of the record, with Flying Lotus down to two tracks: cleaner structures, breathers between the bass runs, choruses that resolve where Lotus would have let them dissolve. Mac Miller appears on She Knows Too Much from pre-2018 recordings, unguarded and careless and present rather than mournful. The pop clarity gives these songs oxygen, and the trade sounds deliberate.