Angelo De Augustine Shares New Album 'Toil And Trouble'

Angelo De Augustine today released his new album Toil and Trouble via Asthmatic Kitty Records.

The follow-up to 2021’s critically acclaimed collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, A Beginner’s Mind – and first solo effort since his 2019 breakthrough LP,  Tomb – Toil and Trouble has arrived to great reviews, including 8/10 stars from Uncut and 4/5 stars from Mojo, and an in-depth Artist Spotlight feature at Our Culture.

Album singles “The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill,” “Toil and Trouble,” and  “Another Universe,” earned early acclaim and support from Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, Under the Radar, BBC Music, The Line of Best Fit, Clash, and NPR Music, with Bob Boilen praising the latter as a “breathtaking song.”

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.  

Photo Credit: Pooneh Ghana