A St. Louis Trio Tracked Their 2023 Single of Defiance Together at Shock City Studios
The guitar on Kiss the World Goodbye steps around Jason Thomas’s vocal instead of burying it. Meanwhile, TJ Davenport plays a drum part that stands up on its own. That balance comes from one decision LastTimeDown made at Shock City Studios in St. Louis. All three members tracked the song live, in the same room. Released as a single on 28 April 2023, the alternative rock track has outlasted its release week by years.
LastTimeDown’s single sits in the playlist below, and the LastTimeDown artist profile gathers the band’s full run of coverage. Kiss the World Goodbye came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Play it once, then keep reading for how the band tracked it.
Kiss the World Goodbye Took the Vocal-Led 90s Alternative Rock Line Onto St. Louis Radio for Two Years
One strand of 1990s alternative rock came from players rather than parts. Soundgarden and Foo Fighters made records where the singer led, the guitar answered and the drummer had something to say. The approach never went away. Later, Highly Suspect carried it through the 2010s with a modern edge. Meanwhile, the listeners who came up on those records are now roughly 25 to 45. They still want songs played by a band rather than assembled from parts.
Kiss the World Goodbye belongs to that strand. Thomas wrote it about a specific moment: the point where you feel most beaten and decide to fight back anyway. The song runs 3:52. It arrived on 28 April 2023 as the advance single for Rose Colored Glasses//First Time Around. That eight-track album followed on 30 December 2023. Inside the record, the song works as the hinge. It marks the point where the album stops absorbing what the world does and starts swinging back.
What happened next is the part no release-week review could have predicted. First, 89.1 The Wood (KCLC) in St. Louis picked the single up. Then the station kept it in rotation for roughly two years. In fact, the song was still on air in late 2025. For an unsigned band, that is a long tail. Four independent outlets in the US and Brazil also reviewed it on release. They were The Metal Asylum, Thoughts Words Action, TJPL News and the Brazilian site Os Garotos de Liverpool. Mesmerized also covered the single, and the band keeps every review on its press page.
A Three-Piece From St. Louis, Formed in 2021
LastTimeDown formed in St. Louis in 2021. Thomas sings and plays guitar, John Madison plays bass and Davenport plays drums. The trio writes vocal-led, guitar-driven alternative rock. Its drum parts aim to be memorable in their own right. So when someone asks what LastTimeDown does, the band points to Kiss the World Goodbye first.
The recording choice is central to that sound. At Shock City Studios, the three of them played the song together in one room. They chose that over stacking isolated takes one at a time. The thinking was simple. A song about refusing to quit had to sound like three people refusing to quit. You can hear it in the way the guitar leaves space for the vocal line. Live tracking tends to reward that habit.
Soundgarden, Foo Fighters and Highly Suspect Sit Closest to LastTimeDown on Kiss the World Goodbye
The nearest neighbours start with Soundgarden. On Superunknown (1994), Matt Cameron played odd-metre drum parts that fans remember in their own right. Think of the shifting metres of Spoonman or the 5/4 of My Wave. Davenport’s work on Kiss the World Goodbye follows the same principle. Here, too, the drum part aims to stick in the memory on its own.
Foo Fighters are the closest match for the recording method. The band cut Wasting Light (2011) on analogue tape in Dave Grohl’s garage in Encino, with producer Butch Vig. It was a deliberate move away from what the band heard as the artificiality of digital recording. Likewise, LastTimeDown made the same kind of call at Shock City Studios. The band chose three people playing together over a performance assembled afterwards.
Highly Suspect is the modern reference point, and the link there is the shape of the band. The group started on Cape Cod as a trio. Johnny Stevens sang and played guitar, while twins Rich and Ryan Meyer held down bass and drums. LastTimeDown has the same footprint, with Thomas on vocals and guitar, Madison on bass and Davenport on drums. A three-piece with a singing guitarist has to leave room. On Kiss the World Goodbye, the guitar does exactly that, working around the vocal line instead of over it.
The Lyric Turns Surrender Into a Dare
Thomas built the lyric from the language of giving up and then argued the opposite with it. The line “so don’t think about leapin” borrows the image of giving up and turns it into a refusal. From there the song moves through “stoke the flame” and “place your bets” into open defiance. So it is a song about choosing to fight at the moment you feel most defeated. The band plays it with that conviction.
Who Should Put It On
This single is for adult rock listeners who came up on 90s alternative. Above all, it suits anyone who never stopped wanting a band in the room. It also suits the Midwest independent rock audience and St. Louis listeners who already met the song on KCLC. Fans of guitar-driven alternative rock with something to say in the lyric belong here too. The Brazilian coverage shows it travels further than its home city, as well. Thomas has also told the band’s story at length, in long-form interviews with VoyageSTL and CanvasRebel.
From the RockRevival.News Curator Team: “Live tracking leaves nowhere to hide. On Kiss the World Goodbye, the band still kept the drum part as memorable as the vocal line. That balance between singer and drummer helps explain two years of St. Louis airplay for an unsigned band.”
Where to Hear Kiss the World Goodbye and Follow the St. Louis Alternative Rock Trio LastTimeDown
Stream Kiss the World Goodbye on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Follow LastTimeDown on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Linktree, or visit the band’s official site.
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