There’s a specific kind of discovery that happens late — you’ve been listening seriously for twenty years, you think you’ve got the map memorized, and then something slips through a side door and just sits down like it owns the place.
Thrill is that record.
Vulfpeck has been doing their thing since 2011, building a cult on the back of the shortest, tightest funk cuts this side of early Meters, funding albums through a Spotify silent release that made the news cycle and confused everyone’s parents. By 2020 they were arena-filling headliners who still sounded like they were recording in a living room. Thrill doesn’t change that formula. It perfects it.
The Room They Built
The record was tracked primarily through their own in-house process — Vulfpeck has never been precious about studios in the traditional sense, but the engineering here, handled largely by the band’s own Theo Katzman and Jack Stratton, is immaculate in a way that rewards headphones and closed eyes. The low end is dry and placed, not boosted. The reverbs, when they appear, are earned. You can hear the decisions.
Antwaun Stanley — who has sung with Maceo Parker and whose voice sounds like it was pressed in 1968 — anchors the back half of the record and gives it a gravity that the instrumental tracks alone can’t quite reach. Joey Dosik handles the more tender moments, and Katzman’s own falsetto appears at the pivot points, the places where the record might lose you if the melody weren’t exactly right.
Joe Dart’s bass is, as always, the argument.
What Restraint Actually Sounds Like
The title track arrives and you think you know where it’s going, and then it simply doesn’t go there. That’s the move Vulfpeck makes over and over — they set up the resolution and then hold it, let it breathe, let the pocket do the work. Woody Goss on keys understands this implicitly. He plays like someone who has listened to a lot of Bill Evans and decided that not playing the note is also a choice.
“Disco Ulysses” became the moment people pointed to when they tried to explain this band to skeptical friends. Clean Bandit interpolated something structurally similar years before, but this is the origin-feeling version — a short instrumental that somehow implies an entire evening. It runs barely two and a half minutes and contains more information than most bands fit into five.
“BEASTLY” is the outlier, the one that leans into the kind of squelched, synth-forward funk that sounds like it fell out of a 1984 session. It shouldn’t fit but it does, because the band’s instinct for dynamics is so reliable that even when they’re playing loud they’re playing quiet.
Why Now
I’ll be honest with you: I slept on this one. I heard the name, filed it under “internet band, probably fine,” and moved on. That was a mistake I’ve been quietly correcting over the past few weeks.
What Thrill actually is, is a record made by people who have absorbed the entire history of American rhythm and soul music and chosen, deliberately, not to show off about it. That’s the hard thing. Showing off is easy. Restraint costs something.
Forty-one minutes. Put it on after the dishes are done.