Today singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine announces his fourth studio album, Toil and Trouble, set for release on AKR on Friday, June 30th. 

The album’s lead single, “Another Universe,” is also out today alongside a fantastical claymation video, written/directed by Angelo and fabricated/animated by Owen Summers. Watch and hear here, below, or your preferred streaming service. 

“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,” says Angelo about the first single and the video.

This is Angelo’s first solo effort since his third album, Tomb, and his follow-up to 2021’s collaboration with Sufjan, A Beginner’s Mind. Toil and Trouble sees Angelo returning to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon. Angelo spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination, creating a work that exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as mystifying as a fever dream or a fairy tale. He wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble on his own, shaping the album’s 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 the album’s immense emotional depth. You can read more about the record here.

You can pre-order an indie gold exclusive color at your local record store.The AKR store features a cauldron-fire colored vinyl, as well as a bundle including a Toil and Trouble themed T-shirt, Angelo’s 2019 Tomb on vinyl, and a randomized set of three Toil and Trouble themed collector cards. Buy from the AKR store here. All versions and formats include artwork by Daniel Anum Jasper and layout and design by Eric Timothy Carlson.