For Kyle Craft, momentum has never looked like a straight line. His so-called second record, Full Circle Nightmare, arrived quickly, but only if you ignore the detours — including a covers album that wasn’t even supposed to exist. “That was all for fun,” Craft said. “Me and my piano player were just hanging out in our studio bored.” He sent the recordings to Sub Pop as a casual check-in. “They were like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ So… that ended up being a record.”
That loose, accidental energy bled straight into Full Circle Nightmare, an album that sounds like it’s catching itself mid-thought. Craft hears it too. “To me, the writing for this album was reflective,” he said. “Dolls of Highland was very ‘in it.’ I was kind of weightless.” This time, he was looking back — broken relationships included — and seeing things clearly instead of mythologizing them. “Seeing it for what it was, not illusion.”
From the outside, the timeline looks impossible: debut album, stopgap covers record, then another full LP in what feels like a blink. Craft insists that’s misleading. “Writing is such a strange animal,” he said. “The ghost comes and goes.” Songs arrived in bursts — half an album in a month, then silence, then another spark weeks later. Some Full Circle Nightmare tracks were already lurking when Dolls of Highland came out, still embryonic but alive. “It’s nice to have a few in the trunk,” he said, especially when the industry whispers start about the dreaded second-album pressure.
If anything, Craft wishes he could move faster. “If it were up to me, I’d spit out as much music as possible,” he said. He misses an older model, when artists toured less and released more — sometimes under brutal deadlines. He rattled off Bob Dylan’s mid-’60s run — Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde — all essentially back-to-back. “That’s the wet dream for me,” Craft said. “Putting out music that rapidly — and that good.”
The urgency carried into the studio. Unlike Dolls of Highland, which Craft made alone at home, Full Circle Nightmare was tracked almost entirely live. “Probably 80 percent of it is me with the band in the room,” he said. The band rehearsed hard, then moved quickly. Some songs took one or two takes. Others ten. The whole thing was done in about two weeks. “That was easy compared to doing it all yourself,” he said.
Easy didn’t mean clean. Craft wanted bleed, mess, evidence of bodies in a room. “I wanted that unhinged, old-school feel,” he said. Tape rolling, then — bam — straight into the song. No safety net. “That honestly was the feel every morning.”
That looseness is the record’s quiet thesis: choruses that stick, yes, but also the sense that something real is happening right now and might fall apart if you stare too hard. Craft wouldn’t have it any other way.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "The Rager" below!
