“It is a beautiful stage,” Stephen Bruner – or Thundercat to most – says of KOKO. “I’m happy that it didn’t completely burn to a crisp.” It’s Monday morning and the two of us have met in Bruner’s hotel in Holborn, discussing his mini four night residency at the cherished venue in Camden that finished up the previous evening. The virtuoso bassist, singer-songwriter, producer, and everything in between has spent the spring so far touring this side of the Atlantic; from Paris to Dublin, Brussels to Amsterdam.

Each of his four shows at KOKO sold-out swiftly, but I was lucky enough to be squeezed into the over-excitable crowd on the Friday night. “I want to convey intricate musicality,” he tells me, something that never seems in doubt when he picks up his instrument. Bruner dazzled alongside his trusted band, keyboardist Dennis Hamm and drummer Justin Brown – on whom he says, “We’ve been together for a long time and it’s crazy because it never feels like I’m not getting my ass kicked all the time.” Nonchalantly ambling his way through classic hits, hidden gems and exclusives of new unreleased cuts, in complete unison with his six-string bass the 39-year-old is a vessel of melody, superseding the typical conventions of the archetypically rhythmic-leaning instrument. It’s the performance of a technician and a feeler, a dichotomy that has always traversed Bruner to peerless heights, present in palpable form for 90 or so minutes of exceptional musicianship.

“Nothing makes up for live performance,” Bruner offers, a twinkle seeping through behind his dark-lensed shades. “I’d rather hear everybody live a lot of the time – mistakes and all. Don’t get me wrong, recording is everything, it’s fantastic. But for me personally, as a playing musician, I love the experience. I couldn’t imagine being there when Jimi [Hendrix] came [to London], you know, you always see video footage of women just falling all over the place, Jimi setting stuff on fire and throwing things places. But you had to be there.”

Amongst the most cherished musicians of his generation, Bruner has long cemented a legacy; endeavours such as this European tour feel more for personal enjoyment and audience satisfaction rather than advertisement of new music or an attempt to augment his acclaim. Four records deep – 2011’s The Golden Age Of Apocalypse, 2013’s Apocalypse, 2017’s Drunk and 2020’s It Is What It Is – the icon-of-his-instrument reflects on his discography with nostalgia, melancholy and, above all, gratitude. “I’m very appreciative of what it has become. My albums to me are like timestamps. They’re a representation of who and where I was at the time. And sometimes it is very hard to look back, but sometimes it’s important too. I’m happy that I have those memories that have been created into the shape of an album. If I ever want to see the shapes of things and where they came from for me, I can see them. That’s kind of bittersweet, you know? But overall, it’s a joyous thing that I’ve gotten to create music, I’m very grateful.”

The records are byproducts of Bruner’s experiences and snapshots of his mentality. His third album Drunk came at one of the darkest times in his life; grappling with alcohol addiction at that point, it’s a tough time for him to remember, with the album a physical reaction to the difficult period. “When I look at Drunk, who I was at the time, I’m not that person anymore. Not like that. What that album was for me, along with however anybody experienced it, it was a lot to hear myself say out loud. I moved on from that person. It exists, I can go look at it, the album cover is funny as hell.”

Six months after the release of Drunk Mac Miller, who was amongst Bruner’s closest friends and most regular collaborators, sadly passed away from an accidental drug overdose. Not long after the tragedy, Bruner quit drinking. I question whether on reflection this proved a turning point for him in his own life, a stark and agonising reminder of the fleeting nature of existence. He pauses, takes a sip of his oolong tea, and answers with unassuming affirmation. “Yeah, man. Yeah. I saw myself in Mac. I could see… what was coming for me. That was a life-altering moment for me. It was painful, not terrifying. It was immensely painful.”

I ask how his state of mind is now, a few years later. “Pain, immense pain,” he jokes, lowering and harshening the tone of his voice to sound like a science-fiction caricature, before shaking off a layer of protection and musing: “What’s my state of mind now? I’m here, man. Just present.”

It’s been four years since Bruner’s fourth studio record, It Is What It Is, an LP that awarded him Best Progressive R&B Album at the Grammys. Swimming against the tide of industry convention, the polymath has never felt incentivised by consistent album cycles; he finds purpose in the production rather than the product. “I’m not creating music with the idea of an album in mind, it only takes shape and form as it shows up,” he says. “I try to make music as unbiased as possible, and I think I’ve been made aware of it as time has progressed, realising that it’s the creation of the music to me that is golden. You spend all this time working on an album and then you release it out in the world and it’s almost like you have a bit of postpartum depression with it, like this is a baby that you’ve spent your time cultivating and making and then it starts taking shape and then you let go of it and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what did I just do?’ I try to create with a hands open approach – whatever it becomes it becomes. Everything isn’t meant to be an album.”

So what’s he been doing in the years following his critically-acclaimed last record? “Life, man. Life has been lifing,” he chuckles. “Kenny Beats has this saying – ‘Don’t overthink shit,’ you know? Everything isn’t meant to have a resolve. There are things that are meant to be finalised and have a beginning and end to stuff, but a lot of the time, it’s just trying to find out what is important. Because I don’t know all the time, I’m always trying to figure out what that is for me. So life is just in between the music.”

Prior to and since his last album, Bruner has been correlating a collaboration anthology that rivals any in the contemporary industry. He’s worked with everyone from Gorillaz to KAYTRANADA, Tame Impala (who his most recent release “No More Lies” came in unison with) to Kendrick Lamar, a linkup that gifted Bruner a first Grammy win for his contributions on To Pimp A Butterfly standout “These Walls”. The Californian is well aware of Lamar’s unparalleled genius, citing him as the most impressive person that he’s ever met, without question. “We have many different personalities on this planet, but meeting Kendrick was an immediate like… ‘I need you to do better.’ It wasn’t even like he projected that necessarily, it’s just – you walk in the room and he’s locked in. Like, how are you this locked in several different directions? He’s just… I’ll never forget it.”

Lamar has been at the forefront of hip hop news in the last month following his featured verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s album cut “Like That”, on which he called out J. Cole and Drake, both of whom have now responded to varying degrees of success. With his sharpened understanding of Lamar’s persona, I ponder Bruner’s take on the debacle. “Kendrick comes out swinging. He’s an orange cat. He’s just like – ‘Man it’s a great day’, and he just punched somebody in the side of the head. It was kind of like a call to action. You walk in and he’s locked in, stepping on people’s necks. He’s challenging you to start fighting back. Because other than that we are all boring. It turns into money raps, ‘I’m off of 20 xans and she about to suck my dick in the car’. Then Kendrick comes out here like – ‘Dead all of that, fight me’. He came back as a reminder, like, ‘Hey y’all forgot we here’.”

Following his European tour, Bruner has a smattering of festivals this summer including a return to London for a performance at All Points East at Victoria Park on 16th August. And then what? A long-awaited fifth album? “Possibly,” he says with slow caution, a grin plastered across his face. Until then, it’s clear he will be living, creating and searching. “One thing that will always be important to me is discovery. Even back-cataloguing music, it’s almost like the ocean. Even the past is still new. We’re in a post-world right now, because you can go just as far back as you can.go forward.”

“I was watching something on the internet the other day,” he says before we shake hands and I’m transported back to my busy Monday. “When they finally got to another part of the ocean where they saw a being so big that they just gave up and stopped looking. NASA spent all this money trying to map out all the oceans and they got to a place in the ocean where they saw the eye of a creature. They were going into the tunnel and the eye was the size of the tunnel. And they just gave up and said, ‘We’re going into space exploration’.”