Photo by Olivia Bee
Garage rocker Kyle Thomas, better known as King Tuff, has returned today with his first new song in four years. Titled “The Other”, it finds Thomas taking a more introspective and mellowed out approach as opposed to the shredding jams found on his last album, 2014’s Black Moon Spell.
“Stuck in traffic on my way to no particular place,” Thomas sings on the track’s opening verse, his lonely and soft spoken voice accompanied by the spare hum of what sounds like a keyboard. “No agenda, no master plan, no important dates/ No reason to be alive at all as far as I can tell.”
As the lyrics suggest, “The Other” originally was born while Thomas was sorting through some difficult and dark things. “It’s a song about hitting rock bottom. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do anymore, but I still had this urge — this feeling — like there was this possibility of something else I could be doing… and then I just followed that possibility,” he shared in a press statement. “To me, that’s what songwriting, and art in general, is about. You’re chasing something, there is something out there calling to you and you’re trying to get at it.”
“‘The Other’ is basically where songs come from,” Thomas added. “It’s the hidden world. It’s the mystery. It’s the invisible hand that guides you whenever you make something. It’s the thing I had to rediscover — the sort of voice I had to follow-to bring me back to making music again in a way that felt true and good.”
Check it out below via its official music video. Directed by Cameron Dutra, it captures a beautiful sunset on a hillside.
