I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)

This is a comedy record that is also genuinely moving, which is either a contradiction or the whole point. Thundercat has never been precious about the line between absurdism and sincerity, and here he obliterates it entirely, writing what amounts to a love song to his friend and collaborator Louis Cole with the same earnest directness he might bring to something far more serious. Cole's own production fingerprints are all over the track — that hyper-compressed, slightly unhinged rhythm programming that KNOWER listeners will recognize immediately, drums hitting with a mechanical precision that somehow still swings, keyboards with a brightness that borders on alarming. Thundercat's bass is in conversation with all of it, bubbling under and occasionally surging forward in fills that show off without being showy. The vocal delivery is deadpan in the way that only very sincere things can be deadpan — there is no irony in the admiration being expressed, just the willingness to say something embarrassing because it is true. What the song is actually about, underneath the comedy, is the specific joy of musical friendship, the experience of encountering someone whose relationship to sound recalibrates your own. It is about finding your person in a creative sense and not being ashamed to say so. The Los Angeles experimental underground scene this emerged from rewards that kind of transparency. Play it loud with someone who knows what KNOWER is and watch recognition break across their face.