Angelo De Augustine

Arriving on the heels of 2021’s 'A Beginner’s Mind'—a collaboration with labelmate Sufjan Stevens—'Toil and Trouble' marks Angelo De Augustine’s first solo effort since his 2019 'Tomb.' His fourth solo LP exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. “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.” 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 detailed sound by performing on 27 different instruments. At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, ‘Toil and Trouble’ is his most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.