Thundercat: Dragonball, The Dodgers, & D’angelo

November 7, 2025

Photographed and Written by Anthony "Tone" Bailey (@_seeyoutmrw)

Thundercat came on my radar back in the late blog era (circa 2015), back when Pigeons and Planes highlighted the release of his EP, The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam. That project featured the timeless song “Them Changes” which has been in rotation with music lovers alike since. Popping up on release after release with artists like Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, and Erykah Badu, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner has gone on to release the critically acclaimed and award-winning albums, Apocalypse, Drunk and It Is What It Is. Ahead of the release of his latest Brainfeeder offering, Bruner stopped in Toronto with Justin Brown on drums and Dennis Hamm on keys.

To the casual listener, Bruner might seem like a cat-loving, weeb, bass player, and they’d be right! But for fans of eccentric composition and songwriting, Thundercat sits at the intersection between legends like Bootsy Collins and Stanley Clarke and contemporaries of the new, including artists like Anderson .Paak and The Internet.

Before entering onstage between the legs of the inflatable Sphinx-like display, the audience was stimulated by the first minute of Really Love by D’angelo. It was a lovely sentiment to start the show and a reminder of the power of a good entrance song. Rocking a Dodger cap and blonde-dyed locs, he quickly set the tone yelling “You know what time it is baby!” and proceeded to electrify the entire room with new single Children Of The Baked Potato.

“Big LA Energy onstage right now.” he said as fans jeered about the Game 7 Score with the Toronto Blue Jays and the LA Dodgers. Playfully waving off any die-hard baseball fans, the band kept it pushing with songs from It Is What It Is, and new material from the upcoming album. A fan had to be escorted out during I Love Louis Cole due to a medical emergency. Thundercat maintained composure of the crowd before returning to the set. He tried to break the ice a little with “You guys wanna hear about the time I got thrown out of a window?”

One thing about a Thundercat show – if you don’t know the words, that’s OK. The grooves alone will guide you. Between Drunk and It Is What It Is, Bruner and company seamlessly bounced off each other, with space for all 3 to shine as a collective. Hits like Funny Thing, Dragonball Durag, and No More Lies became sing-alongs with some audience members flaunting their matching durags. “You guys got some energy tonight!,” Bruner shouts.

Another D’angleo cover came in as the penultimate song, this time the all-time favorite Lady. Basslines were fused with Bruner’s own hit Them Changes to close out the show. The band transitioned back and forth between lyrics of the two joints. As a fan of both artists, hearing Thundercat pay homage twice was a cathartic release after grieving D'Angelo's death as a listener. (Mac Miller’s What’s The Use? was also an interlude earlier in the set.) Returning for an encore, the band played Show You The Way, Friend Zone, and It Is What It Is, finally bringing an end to the night.

Death, love, and comedy are forever intertwined in Thundercat’s work, and a decade after discovering him, he’s only continued to hone in all that emotion for live audiences to leave feeling lighter than they came in.