'Toil and Trouble,' the fourth solo album from Angelo De Augustine, exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. The Southern California-based artist spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination. “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.”

Arriving on the heels of 2021’s 'A Beginner’s Mind'—a collaboration with labelmate Sufjan Stevens—'Toil and Trouble' marks De Augustine’s first solo effort since his 2019 'Tomb.' 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. 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.

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.