New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Acclaimed singer-songwriter
Angelo De Augustine shares "Toil and Trouble," the title track from his forthcoming album due out June 30th via Asthmatic Kitty Records.
The enchanting single arrives alongside a claymation video directed by De Augustine and created by
Clara Murray, which brings the album's mystical cover artwork to life.
"As we all know, we are living in a world within another. A place of specific curation and design where the mind is the chief architect in command. I often wonder who the mind is working for? Who is behind the curtain pulling the strings and transmitting the messages?" -
Angelo De Augustine
Murray, who also made the dreamlike video for the last single, "The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill," explains: "'Toil and Trouble' takes place in a dusty room alight with magic, tucked away but teeming with magic. Flying pop-up books and a singing cauldron give birth to mystical creatures, tapped into a sorcery seemingly both wicked and holy."
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.
"Toil and Trouble," "The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill" and "Another Universe" follow last fall's stand-alone double singles "27" and "Hologram," also recorded, produced, and mixed by De Augustine.
