Thundercat (a.k.a. Stephen Bruner) has been gracing some of the best albums of the last few years with his singular style of sexy-psych-jazz fusion. He appears on Flying Lotus’s brilliant You’re Dead and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, an album that has unexpectedly transcended genre boundaries and seduced listeners who may not normally listen to rap. Now Thundercat is working with FlyLo again, as well as the legendary Herbie Hancock, for an upcoming album, according to Consequence of Sound.
The sultry “Them Changes,†the first track off his new mini-LP The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam (due out June 22), has swagger and heartbreak in about equal measure. It sounds like how you feel when you’ve just been dumped and you’re walking down the sad, desolate, empty subway station at 2 a.m. but you’ve had too much to drink and you’re wobbling all around. As the bass struts sumptuously and the backing vocals ohhh and ahhh, the heartbroken Thundercat unleashes a gorgeous falsetto that makes Justin Timberlake sound weak. Listen to the song, over and over, below: