The mug, half full of cold coffee, had been abandoned beside a stack of artwork and newsletters, forgotten in the rush of creation. An electric guitar rested on the couch, still plugged into effects pedals splayed out across the carpet, the instrument cables running across the floor like a nest of black snakes. Another guitar was propped up against shelves stuffed with books, papers and music. Early spring sunlight through the living room window bathed a drum set in a golden haze.
At the center of it all, holding court in an office chair surrounded by archaic tape-recording machines, Kyle Thomas cut a contented figure. He was in the living room of his new home, down a long dirt road in the Northeast Kingdom. Dressed in a black vest over a hoodie, with a Traveling Wilburys cap crowning a nest of long brown hair, Thomas — better known to the music world as stoner-rock royalty King Tuff — caressed a piece of his vintage gear. Beneath a graying beard, he smiled.
“I made my first record on this bad boy,” he said, gesturing with a wave of a tattooed hand to a Tascam 388 analog eight-channel recording console. He bought the ’80s-era machine 20 years ago, when he first started making music as King Tuff. It sat unused for more than a decade in his parents’ Brattleboro basement before he found and repaired it to record his latest album, MOO, which came out in March. As part of his cross-country tour to promote the new album, he plays the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington on May 19 with bandmates Corey Rose and Noel Friesen.
“I’m planning on making a lot more records on it,” he said of the old Tascam. “I want to get all my friends from LA, from Brattleboro, from everywhere. I want them to make records here. That’s part of why I came back to Vermont … I just want to make cool shit in my own house.”
For the past 20 or so years, Thomas, 43, has forged a career that places him among the most successful rock musicians ever to call Vermont home. Emerging from the same early 2000s Brattleboro indie scene that produced acts such as Tune-Yards and Sam Amidon, he became a critical darling, the toast of Pitchfork, BrooklynVegan and Rolling Stone. After a 2011 move to Los Angeles, he released his 2012 self-titled breakout on iconic record label Sub Pop; it’s an album full of T. Rex-meets-the-Stooges-style lo-fi rock, big guitar riffs and some seriously stoned vibes. He seemed poised to join the likes of indie-rock royalty Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, the latter to whom he’s often compared.
While that coronation never quite came, King Tuff’s career has been enviable. He’s produced a string of well-received records and toured the world, and he pals around with indie luminaries such as Ty Segall. But last year, 15 years after setting out for LA to chase dreams of rock stardom, Thomas moved back to Vermont, where he’s started his own record label and aims to launch the next stage of his career. He follows in the footsteps of a few other eminent indie musicians, including Neko Case and Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker, who’ve landed in the Green Mountains, seeking refuge from an increasingly troubled music industry, an increasingly troubled society or both.
I don’t need to be rich and famous or on some kind of rock-star trip.
kyle thomas
But unlike those artists, Thomas’ arrival is a homecoming. And he told us it was going to happen — and not just by naming his new album after a lowing cow.
Starting with 2018’s The Other and continuing with the 2023 record Smalltown Stardust, his muscular sound took a contemplative turn, with shades of the Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra and R.E.M. All the while, his lyrics suggested a yearning to come home.
“Headlights in an open field / Blizzard on the 91,” he sang on “Smalltown Stardust,” an ode to his old stomping grounds in an album full of them.
Along with Thomas’ literal homecoming is an aesthetic one: a return to the hard-rocking feel of his earlier albums. MOO is a guitar-heavy, retro-sounding masterpiece, a record that looks back at the crust-punk kid with a Marshall stack in Brattleboro and reconciles him with the older, wiser middle-aged rocker in the woods.
“I have so few expectations anymore,” he admitted. “I honestly don’t give a shit about the rat-race aspect of the business anymore.”
Funny thing is, nothing about Thomas’ genial personality gives the sense he ever did. Whether he’s producing a record or sitting around the blunt rotation, Thomas exudes natural bonhomie. He’s a good hang, an artist without artifice. Only when you look at his body of work does his ambition become visible, but that ambition has mutated from what it once was.
As he stepped over guitars and cords on the floor, he offered a reporter his homemade ice cream and pickles — two Vermonty hobbies he’s picked up since returning — while lamenting the lack of pizza delivery in his neck of the woods. Then, with a mischievous smile, he turned to offer an insight.
“You know, I think it was Cyndi Lauper who said it, but all it takes to be a legend is to just stick around long enough,” he said. “I don’t need to be rich and famous or on some kind of rock-star trip. I just want to do what I love and have my small group of people who buy my records and come to shows. I think that was the initial mission, and I’m just getting back to it, in a way.”
The Prince of Brattleboro
A kick drum thumping like a beating heart heralds the start of MOO. Jagged, rope-taut distorted guitars come in snarling before the song erupts in a hard-charging groove. Thomas’ idiosyncratic, slightly askew-yet-melodic vocal arrives to give the listener a quick check-in on King Tuff.
“Don’t talk to me / Let me remain just another stranger,” Thomas sings. “I don’t have a name, and I’m headed down to destiny.”
“Twisted on a Train,” the album’s opening track, is a primordial slice of rock and roll. Warm and gloriously lo-fi, it serves as a proclamation: The mellow, power pop-leaning King Tuff of the past few years is dead. In his stead, the stoner-rock guru has been resurrected, changed by experience.
“Rock and roll is imperfect and messy, but it can also be really pure in this unique way,” Thomas said. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I’m just trying to make songs that I want to hear, you know? I like cheese pizza. I like vanilla ice cream. And cheese pizza and vanilla ice cream are unbeatable in their pure form, just like rock. You don’t need anything else when you have the pure thing.”
He first discovered his love of rock listening to his father, John’s, records. There was a lot of classic rock played in his house, particularly of the psychedelic variety. Jimi Hendrix and Blue Cheer were two early favorites, but things got serious when his dad brought 10-year-old Thomas to his first concert: North Carolina metal act Corrosion of Conformity.
Even more influential was his dad’s purchase of a Fender Stratocaster, which Thomas quickly claimed as his own. In no time, he was working out simple, one-string riffs and writing his first song. He debuted the composition at a school dance in fifth grade, dubbing it “Pickle Boy.”
“I got one of my friends to play … maybe a snare drum?” Thomas said, laughing as he tried to remember the song. “Another friend got up and rapped a verse: Yo, Pickle Boy / He’s too salty.”
Two foundational events happened at that school dance.
First, the band that played after Thomas and his friends was made up of older kids. One of the guitarists showed 11-year old Thomas how to play a power chord, an essential part of hard rock, metal and punk music.
“That was a true holy shit moment for me,” Thomas said, forming his left hand into the shape of the chord in a reflexive air-guitar moment. “You mean I can play three strings at once? Changed everything, man.”
The other life-changer happened as Thomas stood by the punch bowl at the dance, feeling that first postshow adrenaline rush he would come to know so well over his career. A girl approached him with a smile and said, “That was really cool.”
“It was immediate,” he recalled. “I was like, Yeah, I’m doing this. This is what I do now.”
In high school, Thomas formed his first punk band, Ludicrous, playing music inspired by the nearby Boston punk scene and bands such as the Unseen and Dropkick Murphys. Next up was the hardcore band Tomorrow’s Mayhem with his childhood friend Matt Johnson, who would go on to perform in the New York City electronic duo Matt and Kim.
Brattleboro proved a perfect incubator for Thomas. The southern Vermont mill town has long been a magnet for creative types, from writer Rudyard Kipling to painter Wolf Kahn. And it retains a scruffy bohemian vibe that stems either from the influx of hippies in the 1960 and ’70s or, as legend has it, the giant magical crystal on which the town was built.
Much as it has been an economic hub throughout its history, Brattleboro is also a musical crossroads where the southern Vermont and western Massachusetts music scenes meet. A young Thomas logged many miles between Brattleboro and places such as Northampton and Amherst, Mass., touring out of a Honda Civic with his friends.
In 2003, Thomas put together a freak-folk group called Feathers with Kurt Weisman, with whom he worked at a local record shop. The eight-member band featured a slew of Brattleboro songwriters and musicians, including Ruth Garbus, Asa Irons and Chris Weisman, Kurt’s brother. Two years later, Thomas formed the stoner-metal outfit Witch with Dinosaur Jr. guitarist and singer J Mascis on drums, along with Kurt Weisman, Irons and Dave Sweetapple, who died in 2024.
The memory of Mascis, one of rock music’s great guitarists, hauling a massive drum set down the stairs to the basement of Thomas’ parents’ house in Brattleboro still makes Thomas smile all these years later. “And then I had to play lead guitar in front of J fucking Mascis,” he said. “Like, what? How?”
Those bands caught the attention of freak-folk auteur Devendra Banhart, who enlisted Feathers to appear on his 2005 album, Cripple Crow. He later signed them to Gnomonsong, his label with Vetiver’s Andy Cabic, which released Feathers’ 2006 self-titled debut. Feathers’ success spurred national interest in the Brattleboro scene, and, before long, Sub Pop came calling for another Thomas project: Happy Birthday, his garage-rock trio with Garbus and her partner, Chris Weisman. The Seattle label that introduced the world to Nirvana, Soundgarden and the Shins released Happy Birthday’s self-titled debut in 2010.
Garbus, an experimental folk musician, first met Thomas in 2001, shortly after she moved to Brattleboro. Her sister Merrill Garbus, one half of the indie duo Tune-Yards, made the connection.
“He needed a roommate,” Garbus said. “Within five minutes he had changed my name from ‘Ruth’ to ‘Ruthie,’ and we lived together.”
In no time, the two were playing music together. Along with other area musicians and artists, Garbus and Thomas rented a rehearsal space at a building called the Tinderbox, in a massive room they dubbed “Vegetable Street.” The original Vegetable Street sign hangs in Thomas’ Vermont living room today, just above his workstation.
“Kyle is really special,” Garbus said. “I’ve just always felt really held by him — I get emotional. He’s just had a huge impact on my life. He’s such a supportive person, and the way he works is inspiring.”
The way he works is inspiring.
ruth garbus
To Garbus, the secret to Thomas’ success isn’t just his talent, or even that natural stoner charm that draws others into his orbit. It’s his dedication to the craft and his willingness to put his nose to the grindstone.
“People like Kyle, they’re driven,” she said. “They write music, they do their own artwork, they rehearse all the time … they’re definitely obsessed.”
Thomas’ compulsion to make music remains as steadfast as it was 20 years ago.
“You have to be obsessed and relentless,” Thomas said from his Vermont studio, with heaps of promotional material for his record label and new album stacked nearby. “You have to be ready to fail over and over again. Each record is like starting over in some ways, so, for me, I need to have this weird obsession. I need to keep making music.”
In his Brattleboro days, that drive propelled Thomas to start or join as many bands as he could. By the end of the decade, he had an impressive catalog of records from Witch, Feathers and Happy Birthday to show for it. He’d also completed his 2008 King Tuff debut, Was Dead, finally using the moniker he came up with as a teenager, combining his initials with a play on the name “King Tut.”
Feeling the pull of success, the lifelong Brattleboro resident was ready to take his shot at rock stardom. Los Angeles was calling. In 2011, he moved out west.
“It was a tough decision in the sense that I had built this really cool world around me of musical friends,” Thomas said. “But yeah, you have to do scary stuff and jump into the abyss sometimes.”
Western Daze
“Chasing rainbows, chasing dreams / Now it’s catching up to me / ’Cause I’m so tired of spinnin’ my wheels / Negative numbers, dead-end deals.”
The opening lyrics to MOO’s second track, “Stairway to Nowhere,” find Thomas reaching a tipping point.
He wrote the classic rock-leaning jam featuring Rough Francis and Iggy Pop drummer Urian Hackney toward the end of his time in LA. The song is seemingly an admission of defeat, of time wasted striving toward a goal he no longer desires.
His West Coast adventure started out well enough. Thomas chose LA not just for its importance in the music and entertainment world but also because he already had friends living there, including garage rocker Ty Segall. The two would go on to play on each other’s records — Segall plays drums on MOO — and Thomas joined Segall as part of his backing band for a tour.
His own records were garnering attention, too. King Tuff’s 2012 Sub Pop debut peaked at No. 2 on the CMJ New Music Report charts. A 2014 follow-up, Black Moon Spell, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and received critical praise pretty much all around.
But something was missing. The sense of community he felt in the Brattleboro music scene was, for the most part, absent in the frenetic, often segmented LA musical ecosystem.
“Los Angeles is a funny place,” said indie singer-songwriter Sasami Ashworth, an LA native and Thomas’ friend and former roommate. “Everyone living there isn’t from there, and everyone is sort of hustling and hungering for a carrot that’s far away. So when you’re with people, there’s this sense that they’re kind of looking past you.”
Thomas had friends and collaborators, but they were all ships in the night, he said, each heading out on their own tours all the time. He missed the deep connection he treasured with Garbus, Wiseman, Irons and other Vermont musicians.
“The truth is, I never felt super inspired in California,” he admitted.
Nevertheless, he remained productive. Following Black Moon Spell, he released a live album with Segall in 2015 and a studio album, The Other, in 2018.
As the pandemic hit in 2020, Thomas moved into a house in the Mount Washington neighborhood in northeast LA with Ashworth and singer-songwriter and guitarist Meg Duffy of the bands War on Drugs and Hand Habits. Stuck in quarantine, the three musicians worked on and influenced each other’s records: The classically trained Ashworth’s 2022 album, Squeeze, was a guitar-heavy, metal-leaning album à la Thomas. Taking cues from Ashworth, the largely self-taught Thomas’ Smalltown Stardust, released a year later, displayed a more nuanced, complex sonic profile for the rocker.
Thomas pushed the boundaries of his sound on Smalltown Stardust, an album that treads more in the indie and folk-rock terrain of contemporaries such as Kurt Vile or Andy Shauf. But Thomas doesn’t concern himself much with comparisons to other artists, partly to guard against his own insecurities: “I don’t necessarily like my voice,” he admitted.
Thomas is not a “great” singer in the classic sense. While he’d never win “The Voice,” he effectively suffuses his high-toned, slightly nasal timbre with punk grit and a dash of folk whimsy. “There have definitely been times where I hate it, even,” he continued about his voice. “But I’ve come to realize that it’s all about showing my personality when I sing. I don’t worry about sounding like anyone else, because my weird voice just overrides that.”
Despite the thrill of their collaborations, Ashworth could tell Thomas wouldn’t be on the West Coast much longer.
“Kyle is like a forest wizard,” Ashworth said. “He sprouted out of a frozen cauldron in the mysterious woods of Vermont. So you get this sense that he doesn’t really fit in the city. It’s like seeing moss on a sidewalk: It’s cool that it’s there, but it doesn’t really belong.”
And Thomas didn’t hide his growing sense of disillusionment with the city. For all the hubbub around Vermont native Noah Kahan’s 2022 breakout, Stick Season, as a love letter to the Green Mountain State, Smalltown Stardust might be an even more passionate tribute from a prodigal son.
After playing at an all-star 83rd birthday party for no less a luminary than Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, Thomas started planning his return east. The Palisades Fire last year, which destroyed whole neighborhoods and wreathed LA in flames and smoke, was a tipping point.
“It felt a little like hell,” Thomas said. “The air was hot. The sky was orange and black in the day. You couldn’t breathe. I’m super asthmatic too, so it just got to the point where nothing out there felt sustainable.”
In addition to the environmental strain, the growing challenges of operating as an independent musician in the modern music industry forced Thomas to rethink his approach to his career. Like many of his peers, he’s up against diminishing streaming revenue, increasing touring costs, venue closures across the country and pressure to self-promote through social media.
Moving to Vermont would represent a step back, career-wise, as would leaving Sub Pop and starting his own label.
“It can be hard, I’m sure, to readjust once you get a taste of the big venues, the sweet tour bus, all of that,” Thomas said with a sardonic smile. “Luckily, I never really got to that level.”
But along with homesickness, Thomas said his decision was motivated by a desire to break it all down, take full control and build something more enduring.
“It’s weird, but for me, I realized there’s more opportunity, in a sense … back in Vermont,” Thomas said. “It’s a blank page. I feel like I could do anything.”
Northeast of Ordinary
Back in the Northeast Kingdom, Thomas swung open a back door to show off his sprawling yard. Piles of dirty snow spotted the ground as he pointed out the landmarks of his new realm: construction equipment, shovels, wheelbarrows and a blue compost bucket. He looked unmistakably content as he surveyed this properly rural scene in the chill of early spring.
When he first announced he was leaving LA, most assumed he would take up residence in Brattleboro. Thomas instead chose the Northeast Kingdom, a place he’d barely visited and knew nothing about, despite having grown up in Vermont.
“I’d come up to Burlington to see shows and hang, but that was about as far north as I’d go back then,” he explained.
Life in the woods suits him, but the decision to settle in the Northeast Kingdom was based less on vibes and more on feasibility.
“My girlfriend is from here originally,” Thomas said. “We actually met in LA, which is funny, but we had some mutual Vermont connections. Her family owns all this property.”
He also loved the notion of coming back to Vermont but starting a new chapter in an unfamiliar place. While he’s already reconnected and started working with many of his old Brattleboro friends, including Garbus and Chris Weisman, he’s clearly infatuated with his new locale.
“The dude who lives over that hill is a roofer,” Thomas said with a strange sort of glee, pointing past the dirt road leading to his house. “I met a weaver the other day. Weaving is fucking awesome, man.”
Thomas is thrilled to be surrounded by people who work with their hands. “I feel like Vermont has always been a place where people know what they want to do, and they figure out how to make it happen,” he said. “In my soul, that’s what I’m doing: I’m a craftsman.”
His new label, MUP, which may or may not stand for Many Unusual People, depending on when you ask him, is a total DIY effort. Thomas, also a talented visual artist, designs everything. He wrote and printed The Daily MOO, a newsletter that went out with vinyl copies of the record, and he even directs his own music videos.
“I have to figure out a way to sustain this career,” Thomas said. “For me, that involves bringing it back into my own hands more, finding my niche.”
That niche includes helping others make music. Thomas recently produced Garbus’ forthcoming LP, Profound, for Orindal Records. She drove up from Brattleboro to record at her old friend’s new digs.
“Recording on the same old Tascam that we did the Happy Birthday and Feathers records with was just so cool,” Garbus enthused. “That thing has, like, 30,000 miles on it!”
She and Weisman have cameos as Thomas’ backing band in the music video for “Invisible Ink,” making it a sort of unofficial Happy Birthday reunion. Thomas said Weisman plans to record a new album at his studio, as well.
“I just want to make some weird little records with my friends,” he said. “And maybe I’ll become a sort of regional artist — those old-school days where musicians would have a sort of circuit. Hell, I’ll play the damn farmers market; that sounds like a tight little scene. I’ll play for tips, baby!”
Hell, I’ll play the damn farmers market.
kyle thomas
Self-deprecation aside, Thomas isn’t exactly slipping off into obscurity. He’s been grinding to self-promote MOO’s release, fighting his urge to wander outside and instead making obligatory social media promos that album releases now demand and getting ready to tour the country with a backing band. Thomas might be content to bow out of the rat race, but he’s still running a marathon — just one of his own design.
Whether MOO is a hit or a flop doesn’t seem to matter much to him, which likely isn’t something he would have said in his LA days. “I’ve put out enough records to know that you can’t expect anything,” he said, “so I don’t have any expectations other than I’m going to always make music.”
The response to MOO has largely been overwhelmingly positive; Pitchfork claims the album “sounds like the natural evolution of an artist who wandered into experimentation but has found his way back to his gut impulses.”
For Thomas, freed from the ambition of his youth, that’s enough. Or, as he puts it near the end of the record on “East of Ordinary”:
“There’s a wind gonna come around / Lift you up, lay you down, fly you away to a little town / And you won’t need a whole lotta wealth / Just little green leaves and books on the shelf.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Return of the King | Back in Vermont after 15 years in LA, indie rocker Kyle Thomas — aka King Tuff — eyes a new stage of his music career”
This article appears in May 6 • 2026.
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