Angelo De Augustine has announced his new album, Toil and Trouble, will be released Friday, June 30th via Asthmatic Kitty. The album’s lead single, “Another Universe,” is also out today alongside a 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 the Thomas Bartlett-produced Tomb, and follow-up to 2021’s 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.”

Angelo De Augustine
Toil and Trouble
Tracklist
Asthmatic Kitty Records

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

Ore-order Toil and Trouble by Angelo De Augustine HERE