Kyle Thomas has been operating as King Tuff out of Vermont for nearly two decades, and the man has earned the right to do whatever he wants. Somewhere around 2016, Thomas started pulling away from the noisy, wired-up rock thing he was known for — The Other in 2018 and Smalltown Stardust in 2023 were more introspective and mellow , and if you were at those live shows, you could feel the polite energy of a crowd waiting for something to blow the roof off. Thomas has admitted he spent every live show just waiting to get to the older songs. That's about as honest a confession as a musician can make. So he did the only logical thing: he got his Tascam 388 fixed — the same tape machine he used to record his first album, King Tuff Was Dead, which had been sitting in his parents' house in Vermont for the past 14 years — dragged it back into the room and hit record.
"Twisted On A Train" is what came out first, and the origin story is almost too good. The track is about taking an overnight train from Tucson to LA, eating a weed gummy, freaking out, and staying up all night in the observation car writing the very lyrics you're hearing. That loop of experience feeding itself is exactly what makes it work — it has the kind of weird, restless energy that matches the story. Thomas recorded the whole thing in a few hours, which was basically the opposite of how he'd been working in the computer. You can hear that immediacy in every guitar scrape. The tape recording gives everything a warm, slightly worn sound, like the record has already been played a hundred times; the guitar tones are crunchy and direct, the drums hit hard and sit up front in the mix. Full of pre-EVH ax work and a riff that grabs you, it wouldn't be out of place on the Dazed and Confused soundtrack.
What makes this more than a nostalgia flex is Thomas's own stated philosophy. In the press materials for the album MOO, he put it plainly: "Rock and Roll is the music of rodents and bugs. It should sound like it crept from a decrepit trashcan or a crypt or a toilet. It is not chill or vibey, autotuned or on the grid. It is not perfect, which is why it's perfect." That's not posturing — "Twisted On A Train" is the proof of concept. MOO picks up closer to where Black Moon Spell left off in 2014, though rougher around the edges, and the tape recording process pushes it back toward the spirit of Was Dead, where every sound had to be committed immediately with no digital second-guessing. King Tuff didn't find himself again. He just stopped pretending he'd lost it.