Following his recent breathtaking and cinematic collaboration with Sufjan Stevens on A Beginner's Mind, Angelo De Augustine returns with his fourth solo album Toil and Trouble. Released on Sufjan's Asthmatic Kitty label, the album finds De Augustine returning to his introspective and lonesome ways, crafting a new universe where hushed psychedelia runs the game. Fans of (there's that name again) Sufjan Stevens' album Seven Swans or Elliott Smith's more stripped back offerings will find so much to love here. - Flying Out

The fourth solo album from Angelo De Augustine, Toil and Trouble exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. In creating such an all-enveloping body of work, the Southern California-based artist spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination. “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.

Arriving on the heels of 2021’s A Beginner’s Mind—a critically acclaimed collaboration with Sufjan Stevens—Toil and Trouble marks De Augustine’s first solo effort since his breakthrough album Tomb (produced by Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman). In a return to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon, De Augustine wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble, 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.

Tracklisting:

1. Home Town
2. The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill
3. Memory Palace
4. Healing Waters
5. The Painter
6. I Don't Want to Live, I Don't Want to Die
7. Another Universe
8. Song of the Siren
9. Blood Red Thorn
10. Naked Blade
11. D.W.O.M.M
12. Toil and Trouble

ANGELO DE AUGUSTINE