King Tuff shares “Tell Me,” the third single from his anticipated new album, Smalltown Stardust, out January 27th via Sub Pop. The pop gem, which features backing vocals from the album’s co-writer and co-producer SASAMI, perfectly encapsulates Kyle Thomas’ knack for melody and songwriting prowess.
“Almost every song in the world is about love, yet somehow there’s still not enough love songs,” says Thomas. “And if you took all the love songs in the world and added them to all the love songs that haven’t been written yet, well, there still wouldn’t be enough. There’s always room for more love and there’s always room for more love songs. Love is an endless well, you can do love songs about people, nature, passion, frustration, animals, joy, madness. Most of my songs are love songs, and I like it that way. But I’m still not satisfied! I want more! I want more love! And I want you to have more love! So here’s ‘Tell Me,’ a love song.”
Smalltown Stardust is “an album about love and nature and youth,” Thomas explains. It’s a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalog, as evidenced by the album’s new single “Tell Me.” On Smalltown Stardust, Thomas takes us on his journey to a place where past and present collide, where he can be a dreamer in love with all that he sees. Images of his youth abound.
King Tuff’s 2023 North American tour kicks off March 1st in San Diego, CA and wraps April 7th at Joshua Tree, CA with a show at Pappy and Harriets. All dates below.
SMALLTOWN STARDUST TOUR DATES:
March 1 San Diego, CA @ Casbah
March 3 Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room
March 4 San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel
March 6 Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
March 7 Vancouver, BC @ The Wise Hall
March 8 Seattle, WA @ Neumos
March 10 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
March 11 Denver, CO @ Globe Hall
March 15 Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall Upstairs
March 17 Nashville, TN @ The Basement East
March 18 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
March 19 Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
March 21 Washington, DC @ DC9
March 22 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
March 23 Boston, MA @ The Sinclair
March 24 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Hall
March 25 Brattleboro, VT @ The Stone Church
March 28 Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB
March 29 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
March 31 Chicago, IL @ The Empty Bottle
April 1 Minneapolis, MN @ The Turf Club
April 3 Kansas City, MO @ The Record Bar
April 5 Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf
April 6 Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge
April 7 Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy and Harriet’s
“There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share.”
It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020.
But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro, Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand.
“I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects.
While so much of Smalltown Stardust invokes idealized traces and places of Thomas’s past, the album’s recording process made his communal vision a reality. Thomas’s Los Angeles home in 2020 formed a micro-scene of sorts, with housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth recording their own heralded albums (2021’s Fun House and 2022’s Squeeze, respectively) at the same time. A shared spirit dominated an era spent largely on the premises, with Thomas serving as engineer and contributor to both records, and Ashworth working as co-producer on Smalltown Stardust. Thomas describes the time with a fitting metaphor: “I’ve always thrived around other people making things. You want to bloom with each other.” Ashworth’s contributions are vital to the album: she co-wrote a majority of the record and contributed vocals, arrangements, and instrumentation to each song. As Thomas notes, “I tried to follow her vision a lot. It helps to open your world to collaborators. You always get something completely different than you would have expected.”
In the end, Smalltown Stardust is not merely a nostalgia trip. In making the record, Thomas not only conjured a special time in his life, he found new inspiration, surrounded by a small circle of collaborators and a sense of love and wonder for nature. If the first King Tuff record was content to merely state Thomas was no longer dead, Smalltown Stardust is a paean to what that life means. A statement of belief and a hymnal to the magic still to behold all around us. “I’m a different person now than I was 20 years ago when I first started it. But oddly, when I first started the band, it was more like this,” he says. Which is to say, things have come full circle.
King Tuff shares a wild video for “Portrait of God,” the rollicking new single from his recently announced new album, Smalltown Stardust, out January 27th via Sub Pop.
“If you were to ask me what my religion is I would say 3 things: Music, Art, and Nature. Those are the things I’ve dedicated my life to and which bring me the purest of joy,” Thomas explains. “Often when I’m making art or music I feel something guiding me- call it god, call it Magic, call it Jim… whatever it is, it makes me happy! My god is probably something totally different than yours, and that’s a beautiful thing! I was thinking about that one day, so I wrote this song. What does your god look like? Is it a frog sitting atop a mushroom? A fifteen headed cobra? A swirling vortex? Old white guy with a long white beard is the only wrong answer!”
At the core of Smalltown Stardust lies Thomas’s desire to commune with nature on a spiritual level. Images of the natural world, from blizzards to green mountains to cloudy days, fill the songs and create a setting unmistakably far away from Los Angeles, as evidenced in the “Portrait of God” video, shot in the rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. “It’s one of my favorite places on Earth, perhaps the most magical forest I’ve ever seen! It was honestly hard to concentrate on making the video when there was so much mossy love around us,” says Thomas. The video, directed by Nicola and Juliana Giraffe, co-stars SASAMI, who also co-wrote and co-produced the album.
Last month, King Tuff announced the album with a video for the title track “Smalltown Stardust,” which Consequence praised as “a triumphant return,” Rolling Stone called a ‘Song You Need To Know’ and Paste named one of the ‘Best Songs of the Week’ saying it’s “warped in unexpected ways.”
King Tuff is hitting the road next year in support of Smalltown Stardust. The North American tour kicks off March 1st in San Diego, CA and wraps April 7th at Joshua Tree, CA with a show at Pappy and Harriets. All dates below.
SMALLTOWN STARDUST TOUR DATES:
March 1 San Diego, CA @ Casbah
March 3 Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room
March 4 San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel
March 6 Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
March 7 Vancouver, BC @ The Wise
March 8 Seattle, WA @ Neumos
March 10 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
March 11 Denver, CO @ Globe Hall
March 15 Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall Upstairs
March 17 Nashville, TN @ The Basement East
March 18 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
March 19 Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
March 21 Washington, DC @ DC9
March 22 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
March 23 Boston, MA @ The Sinclair
March 24 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Hall
March 25 Brattleboro, VT @ The Stone Church
March 28 Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB
March 29 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
March 31 Chicago, IL @ The Empty Bottle
April 1 Minneapolis, MN @ The Turf Club
April 3 Kansas City, MO @ The Record Bar
April 5 Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf
April 6 Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge
April 7 Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy and Harriet’s
There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share.
It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020.
But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro, Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand.
“I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects.
The result is Smalltown Stardust, a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalog. On Smalltown Stardust, Thomas takes us on his journey to a place where past and present collide, where he can be a dreamer in love with all that he sees. Images of his youth abound.
While so much of Smalltown Stardust invokes idealized traces and places of Thomas’s past, the album’s recording process made his communal vision a reality. Thomas’s Los Angeles home in 2020 formed a micro-scene of sorts, with housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth recording their own heralded albums (2021’s Fun House and 2022’s Squeeze, respectively) at the same time. A shared spirit dominated an era spent largely on the premises, with Thomas serving as engineer and contributor to both records, and Ashworth working as co-producer on Smalltown Stardust. Thomas describes the time with a fitting metaphor: “I’ve always thrived around other people making things. You want to bloom with each other.” Ashworth’s contributions are vital to the album: she co-wrote a majority of the record and contributed vocals, arrangements, and instrumentation to each song. As Thomas notes, “I tried to follow her vision a lot. It helps to open your world to collaborators. You always get something completely different than you would have expected.”
In the end, Smalltown Stardust is not merely a nostalgia trip. In making the record, Thomas not only conjured a special time in his life, he found new inspiration, surrounded by a small circle of collaborators and a sense of love and wonder for nature. If the first King Tuff record was content to merely state Thomas was no longer dead, Smalltown Stardust is a paean to what that life means. A statement of belief and a hymnal to the magic still to behold all around us. “I’m a different person now than I was 20 years ago when I first started it. But oddly, when I first started the band, it was more like this,” he says. Which is to say, things have come full circle.
King Tuff, the project of Kyle Thomas, announces his long-awaited new album Smalltown Stardust, with a video for its lead single and title track “Smalltown Stardust.” The album is available for pre-order now and due January 27th via Sub Pop.
Smalltown Stardust, which was co-produced and largely co-written with SASAMI, is “an album about love and nature and youth,” Thomas explains. Much like its lead single, the album is an ode to the cherished moments of inspiration and the small towns in which they are formed. Thomas pulled from his nostalgia for where he grew up, where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. It’s a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalog.
“The truth is I never really wanted to leave my little town in Vermont. I knew it was something I had to do in order to actually pursue a career as a musician, but I loved my life there, and I cried and cried the day I left on a Greyhound bus for LA in 2011,” says Thomas. “In some alternate dimension there’s a version of me still living there, still hanging on the stoop, drawing pictures in the coffeeshop, walking the railroad tracks that run along the river… but alas, in this here dimension, I’m nothing but a townie without a town! ‘Smalltown Stardust’ is a song about keeping that little place and all its strange magic with me wherever I go. It’s a portal that I can access when I need inspiration, or when the city feels too big and hot and I need to mentally escape into some dark woods. It’s a place I found myself going to often in the last few years while I was writing this record, stuck in scorched and crispy ol’ Los Angeles, so it felt fitting as an album title as well as the first song to release into the world. Enjoy!”
At its core, Smalltown Stardust showcases Thomas’s desire to commune with nature on a spiritual level. Images of the natural world, from blizzards to green mountains to cloudy days, fill the songs and create a setting unmistakably far away from Los Angeles, where Thomas resides with SASAMI and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy. “I consider nature to be my religion,” he expounds, and Smalltown Stardust is nothing if not a spiritual exploration. If the first King Tuff record was content to merely state Thomas was no longer dead, Smalltown Stardust is a paean to what that life means. A statement of belief and a hymnal to the magic still to behold all around us.
Additionally King Tuff has announced a 2023 North American tour that kicks off March 1st in San Diego, CA and wraps April 7th at Joshua Tree, CA with a show at Pappy and Harriets. Tour highlights include shows in Los Angeles, CA, Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL. Tickets will be available on Friday October 28th at 10 am local time. All dates below.
March 15 Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall Upstairs
March 17 Nashville, TN @ The Basement East
March 18 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
March 19 Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
March 21 Washington, DC @ DC9
March 22 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
March 23 Boston, MA @ The Sinclair
March 24 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Hall
March 25 Brattleboro, VT @ The Stone Church
March 28 Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB
March 29 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
March 31 Chicago, IL @ The Empty Bottle
April 1 Minneapolis, MN @ The Turf Club
April 3 Kansas City, MO0 @ The Record Bar
April 5 Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf
April 6 Phoenix, AZC @ The Rebel Lounge
April 7 Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy and Harriet’s
There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share.
It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020.
But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro, Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand.
“I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects.
While so much of Smalltown Stardust invokes idealized traces and places of Thomas’s past, the album’s recording process made his communal vision a reality. Thomas’s Los Angeles home in 2020 formed a micro-scene of sorts, with housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth recording their own heralded albums (2021’s Fun House and 2022’s Squeeze, respectively) at the same time. A shared spirit dominated an era spent largely on the premises, with Thomas serving as engineer and contributor to both records, and Ashworth working as co-producer on Smalltown Stardust. Thomas describes the time with a fitting metaphor: “I’ve always thrived around other people making things. You want to bloom with each other.” Ashworth’s contributions are vital to the album: she co-wrote a majority of the record and contributed vocals, arrangements, and instrumentation to each song. As Thomas notes, “I tried to follow her vision a lot. It helps to open your world to collaborators. You always get something completely different than you would have expected.”
Here we have a brand new track from the one and only King Tuff! He also has a little something to say about it:
“I’m Free” is a song I wrote a few years back which first appeared on Ty Segall’s album Freedom’s Goblin. Ty had asked me to write a song for him to record and I had this little demo laying around which I gave to him. I never really thought about it much after that but recently I was asked if I would ever release my own version of the song… so here it is! My favorite time to write songs has always been in the middle of the night. The world slows down and the little nocturnal critters start hooting, howling, buzzing, bubbling… there’s just different ideas that float around that you can’t catch during the day. This is a small song about that. The crickets and raindrops you hear towards the end of the song were recorded one night in June in Vermont outside of a witches hut.”
King Tuff has announced a massive North American tour for 2019. The Infinite Smiles tour - which follows his recently completed tour with labelmate Father John Misty - begins January 9th in Tucson, AZ, with stops in Athens, Charlotte, New York City, Brattleboro, Chicago, St. Paul, Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, and more, ending with a two-night stand in San Diego on February 22nd & 23rd.
In the words of King Tuff: “The Infinite Smiles tour is going down smack dab in the middle of winter depression. We will be traversing the snowy landscape wearing our finest shades of sunshine to try and bring a little light to the gloom! Our last tour focused mainly on the new album, but for this one we’ll be busting out some older jams and hopefully trying out some all new things. And yes, there will be Space Horn.” (full list of dates below).
In tandem with this announcement, King Tuff has released a cover of the classic ABBA song “S.O.S.” via the Amazon Original series. About the song: “‘S.O.S.’ is a really sad song if you actually listen to the lyrics, but like a lot of ABBA songs you don’t notice because the music is so fun and uplifting. My heart has had kind of a rollercoaster of a year so it made sense to cover this song, slow it down, and swim around in the beautiful sadness of it.”
Amazon Music listeners can simply say, “Alexa, play King Tuff’s “S.O.S.’” in the Amazon Music app for iOS and Android and on Alexa-enabled device. In addition to the new track, Amazon Music listeners can access hundreds of Amazon Original songs and numerous albums featuring both emerging and established artists across numerous genres, available to stream and purchase, only on Amazon Music. Click here to listen.
King Tuff (aka Kyle Thomas) presents a remix by Peaking Lights of the preening funk jam “Raindrop Blue” from the 2018 King Tuff album The Other.
King Tuff had this to say of the remix: “Another remix! I sent ‘Raindrop Blue’ to Peaking Lights and they put it thru their astral deli slicer and projected it through a frosty prism out onto the hot floor of a Venusian nightclub. Enjoy!” [And you might also enjoy it on Spotify or Apple Music.]
This new remix follows Tune-Yards recent take on “Psycho Star,” the psychedelic, day-glo-pop single from The Other hear here.
King Tuff’s previously announced fall North American tour in support of The Other begins on September 12th. Headlining shows include September 12th in Las Vegas at Bunkhouse Saloon, September 15th in Fort Collins at Hodi’s Half Note, September 17th in Kansas City at The Riot Room, and October 5th in Mobile at The Merry Widow.
Then, from September 18th-October 10th, King Tuff joins Sub Pop-labelmate Father John Misty for a 17-date tour. See below for a complete list of dates.
King Tuff’s The Otheris available on CD/LP/DL/CS worldwide from Sub Pop [link here].
Sep. 12 - Las Vegas, NV - Bunkhouse Saloon Sep. 15 - Fort Collins, CO - Hodi’s Half Note Sep. 17 - Kansas City, MO - The Riot Room Sep. 18 - Madison, WI - Orpheum Theatre * Sep. 20 - Milwaukee, WI - Pabst Theater * Sep. 21 - Indianapolis, IN - MacAllister Amphitheater @ Garfield Park * Sep. 22 - Cleveland, OH - Agora Theatre * Sep. 23 - Pittsburgh, PA - Smiling Moose Sep. 25 - Charlottesville, VA - Sprint Pavilion * Sep. 26 - Charlotte, NC - Fillmore Charlotte * Sep. 28 - Miami, FL - Fillmore Miami * Sep. 29 - Orlando, FL - Hard Rock Live * Oct. 01 - Athens, GA - Georgia Theatre * Oct. 02 - Athens, GA - Georgia Theatre * Oct. 03 - Birmingham, AL - Iron City * Oct. 05 - Mobile, Alabama - The Merry Widow Oct. 06 - New Orleans, LA - Civic Theater * Oct. 09 - Knoxville, TN The Mill & Mine * Oct. 10 - Oxford, MS - Lyric Theater * Oct. 12 - Greenville, SC - Fall for Greenville Oct. 13 - Lexington, KY - Burl * w/ Father John Misty
