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.

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