King Tuff Announces New Album Smalltown Stardust, Shares Video for Title Track

Los Angeles-via-Brattleboro, Vermont singer/songwriter Kyle Thomas has announced Smalltown Stardust, his first new album as King Tuff in four years, after 2018’s The Other. The video for its lead single and title track is out now ahead of the LP’s Jan. 27, 2023, release on Sub Pop.

While living in L.A. in 2020, Thomas not only engineered and contributed to new albums from his housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI)—2021’s Fun House and 2022’s Squeeze, respectively—but also made one of his own, co-produced by (and mostly co-written with) Ashworth. “I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” Thomas explains in press materials.

Thomas describes Smalltown Stardust as “an album about love and nature and youth” in a statement, continuing:

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. 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!

Thomas adds of the album’s title track:

“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.

“Smalltown Stardust” does feel like it was left out in the L.A. sun too long, leaving its shape warped in unexpected ways. A twitchy backbeat propels its fried guitar-pop sound, with Ashworth’s vocals flickering in the background of verses, then fusing with Thomas’ in the chorus. Unsettling piano and synth tones and angular electric guitar appear, then disappear just as suddenly, keeping you chasing the song, much like Thomas himself: ”’Cause I’m holding onto wonder / Holding something I can’t touch / Holding onto Smalltown Stardust,” he and Ashworth croon, two seekers with wide eyes.

In addition to his new record, King Tuff has announced a 2023 North American tour that starts in San Diego, California, on March 1, crossing the country before concluding with an April 7 stop in Pioneertown, California. The band will play L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Brattleboro, Toronto and Chicago along the way. Tickets go on sale Friday, Oct. 28, at 10 a.m. local time.