Kyle Thomas will release Smalltown Stardust, his first King Tuff album in five years, on January 27 via Sub Pop. The album was co-produced and co-written with frequent collaborator/roommate SASAMI and is, in Kyle's words, “an album about love and nature and youth." "I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical," he adds.
All of those things (love, nature, youth) figure into the album's title track, which is about Kyle's Vermont hometown. “The truth is I never really wanted to leave my little town in Vermont," he says. "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! ‘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.”