Los Angeles

The city gets the melancholy treatment here that its most celebrated artistic products have always both earned and resisted. Thundercat grew up in Los Angeles, which means he cannot see it from the outside, cannot perform the visitor's wonder or the transplant's deliberate romance — he just lives inside it the way you live inside something that formed you, with an intimacy that contains both love and the weariness that comes from knowing a place's worst truths. The production is slower than most of "Drunk," quieter too, built on a bass line that moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who has nowhere to be. Synthesizer textures drift through like marine layer, that particular coastal cloud cover the city is known for, which obscures the sun without eliminating the light. His voice here does not reach for the acrobatic falsetto that anchors other tracks — it stays closer to the chest, conversational, the register of someone thinking out loud rather than performing. The song's emotional center is ambivalence, genuinely felt: a place can be beautiful and broken, generative and destructive, yours and not quite yours. Thundercat does not resolve this — he lets it sit. This is music for driving on freeways at dusk when the smog turns the sky pink and orange and the city briefly looks like a postcard version of itself. It is for people who have complicated feelings about home, which is most people, if they are honest.