Thunderclouds

Chart History and Background: "Thunderclouds" by LSD (Labrinth, Sia and Diplo)

"Thunderclouds" was released by LSD, the collaborative supergroup comprising Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo, on August 3, 2018. The track served as the second single from LSD's debut and only studio album, Labrinth, Sia and Diplo Present... LSD, which was released in April 2019 through Columbia Records and Syco Music. The group itself was conceived as a genuinely collaborative creative project rather than a contractual arrangement, with all three members contributing across songwriting, production, and performance in ways that reflected their individual strengths. Labrinth, born Timothy McKenzie, handled much of the musical composition and co-produced alongside Diplo. Sia, born Sia Furler, contributed her distinctive vocal and lyrical sensibility. Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, brought his extensive electronic and trap-influenced production expertise to the project.

The song was written by all three members, a genuine co-writing credit that reflects the project's stated collaborative ethos. The production fuses Labrinth's orchestral pop instincts with Diplo's electronic and bass-music background, creating a track that moves between tender, melodic passages and more driving, rhythmically assertive sections. Sia's vocal performance on the track is among the most restrained in her discography, with a warmth and vulnerability that contrasts somewhat with the more maximalist vocal approach of many of her solo recordings, suggesting that the collaborative context invited a different mode of expression.

On the Billboard Hot 100, "Thunderclouds" reached number sixty, a modest showing by the commercial standards of its three constituent artists individually. However, the song's performance on streaming platforms was considerably stronger than its Hot 100 position suggested, with the track accumulating substantial Spotify and Apple Music plays driven by listener discovery through editorial playlists and algorithmic recommendation. The song was more commercially successful in international markets, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia, where the combined star power of Sia and Labrinth carried particular weight with mainstream audiences.

The track was accompanied by an animated music video that presented the three artists as cartoon characters in a visual universe consistent with the whimsical, colorful aesthetic that characterized the LSD project's visual identity across all of its releases. The animated format was a deliberate choice that allowed the project to establish its own visual identity distinct from the three artists' individual personas, which were already strongly established and would have been difficult to subordinate to a new collaborative brand in a conventional music video format. The animation was created with considerable visual ambition and received positive attention from both pop culture media and animation industry observers.

The LSD album was greeted with strong critical reception upon its release in 2019, with reviewers consistently praising the organic quality of the collaboration and the way the three artists' individual strengths had combined into something that felt genuinely new rather than merely additive. "Thunderclouds" was frequently cited in these reviews as one of the album's highlights, praised for its emotional scope and the interplay between Labrinth's compositional architecture and Sia's lyrical expressiveness. Diplo's production contributions to the track were described as notably restrained relative to his solo and collaborative work under other names, with the production serving the song's emotional content rather than foregrounding his signature electronic aesthetic.

The LSD project and "Thunderclouds" specifically occupied an interesting position in the music landscape of 2018 and 2019, arriving at a moment when the concept of the supergroup was being reconsidered in pop music after a period of skepticism about whether such arrangements could produce genuine artistic value. The commercial and critical success of the LSD album, modest by blockbuster standards but meaningful for a project of its kind, contributed to renewed interest in collaborative pop arrangements that prioritized creative chemistry over commercial calculation. The project has not released new music as of the time of this writing, but all three members have spoken warmly about the experience in subsequent interviews, leaving open the possibility of future collaboration.

"Thunderclouds" received substantial placement in film and television synchronization contexts following its release, aided by its emotional scope and the distinctive quality of Sia's voice, which has been among the most widely recognized in commercial synchronization work for more than a decade. The song was also performed at various award show events and broadcast specials during the promotional cycle for the LSD album, giving it television visibility that reinforced its streaming footprint. The combination of three internationally known names on a single release generated a level of media attention that benefited the album's reception well beyond what any single artist's solo project might have achieved at that stage in their respective careers, and "Thunderclouds" served as an effective commercial and artistic introduction to what the collaboration had produced. Its ongoing presence in playlists and streaming recommendations confirms that it found a genuine audience beyond the curiosity generated by the project's star-studded composition.