Angelo De Augustine is an artist and songwriter living in Thousand Oaks, California—a suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. He has released three albums including his self-released debut, Spirals of Silence (2014), and two for Asthmatic Kitty Records, Swim Inside The Moon (2017) and Tomb (2019). These records, each released to increasing global notoriety, showcased De Augustine’s preternatural talent for songwriting. While Swim Inside The Moon was produced at home and recorded in his bathtub, De Augustine’s acclaimed third full length album Tomb marked a significant shift with production by Thomas Bartlett (a.k.a. Doveman) at New York City’s Reservoir Studios. In 2021, De Augustine collaborated with labelmate Sufjan Stevens to record the critically acclaimed A Beginner’s Mind, an album of 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films.

In June of 2023, De Augustine released his fourth solo studio album, Toil and Trouble. In a return to the self-contained approach of Spirals of Silence and 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). De Augustine  spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination to create this all-enveloping body of work. “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, Toil and Trouble is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.