Angelo De Augustine Opens The Door To 'Another Universe'

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine today announced his fourth studio album, Toil and Trouble, will be released Friday, June 30th via Asthmatic Kitty.

The album's wonderful, cosmic lead single, "Another Universe," is also out today alongside a fantastical claymation video, written/directed by De Augustine and fabricated/animated by Owen Summers.

"I grew tired of reality and so I decided to make a world of my own. It is a safe world. The kind of place in which only good things happen," De Augustine says of the song.

De Augustine's first solo effort since 2019's breakthrough third album, the Thomas Bartlett-produced Tomb, and follow-up to 2021's critically acclaimed collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, A Beginner's Mind, Toil and Trouble sees the Southern California artist returning to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017's Swim Inside the Moon.

De Augustine spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination, creating an all-enveloping work that exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale.

He wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble on his own, shaping the album's ornately detailed sound by performing on 27 different instruments (including such oddities as a xylophone made of glass).

In the midst of that highly experimental process, he endured an ephemeral but nightmarish period of otherworldly sensations and supernatural visions-an experience that briefly disrupted the album's creation but in the end helped to enrich Toil and Trouble's immense emotional depth.

"This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be," says De Augustine. "I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what's actually going on here - I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality."

At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.

"Another Universe" follows last fall's stand-alone double singles "27" and "Hologram," also recorded, produced, and mixed by De Augustine. In other recent news, "Time" from Tomb is featured on the trailer and soundtrack for Zach Braff's new film, A Good Person, in theaters now.

Watch the new music video here:

Photo Credit: Pooneh Ghana

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