Angelo De Augustine shares new single ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’

ANGELO DE AUGUSTINE SHARES ‘THE BALLAD OF BETTY AND BARNEY HILL’

OTHERWORLDLY NEW SINGLE AND VIDEO INSPIRED BY THE BARNEY AND BETTY HILL UFO INCIDENT

FOURTH SOLO ALBUM TOIL AND TROUBLE ARRIVES VIA ASTHMATIC KITTY RECORDS ON 30 JUNE

“A timely reminder of his genius; a calming and meditative portal into a secret bunker of shimmering guitars and impossibly captivating vocals”
Secret Meeting ‘Single of the Week’

“Airy ambience matched to the vivid beauty we’ve come to expect from his work”
Clash

“Do yourself a massive favour and just immerse yourself in it”
God Is In The TV ‘Tracks of the Week’

“Breathtaking”
NPR

Watch the video for ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIxD_CkrbVQ

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Angelo De Augustine today shares the second single, ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’, from his upcoming album Toil and Trouble. The song is based on the Betty and Barney Hill incident, a famous UFO sighting and alien encounter involving a couple in New Hampshire in 1961. ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’ pulls us deeper into Toil and Trouble, De Augustine’s exploration of the counter-world that the fantastical ‘Another Universe‘ single introduced us to last month. Clara Murray’s accompanying video for ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’ depicts a dreamlike, abstract vision of the couple and their dog in dynamic stop-motion animation.

Speak of the track Angelo says:
“While making the album I endured an experience so horrendous, torturous, and inexplicable that words fail me and explanation seems impossible. Within this period, I felt a close connection to Betty and Barney Hill and their story. I even started to believe that perhaps I had been abducted by some kind intergalactic being as they claimed occurred to them fifty-four years ago. When we experience something that doesn’t make logical sense, the mind looks to conjure any explanation no matter how outlandish it appears. We appear to crave understanding. Perhaps it makes us feel safe. The looming presence of the unknown is daunting and sometimes frightening. However, there is much we do not yet understand, some of which we will never comprehend.”

Video director Clara Murray says:
“As with any alien abduction story, the case of Betty and Barney Hill left me unsettled, curious, doubtful. I wanted to capture that faltering feeling through repetitive, abstract events—as if the car is moving through time and space until time and space itself degrades around them—the characters, stuck in a loop, ultimately ending up in the same place they began. The setting is eerie, shifting, dreamlike and yet the invasion is corporeal—a haunting within flesh—as described by Barney Hill, ‘Oh those eyes. They’re there in my brain.'”

De Augustine’s first solo effort since 2019’s breakthrough third album, the Thomas Bartlett-produced Tomb (“blessed with a unique ability to raise something beautiful from wasted ground” 8/10 The Line of Best Fit), and follow-up to 2021’s critically acclaimed collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, A Beginner’s Mind (“An exceptional album” The Sunday Times ‘Album of the Week’), Toil and Trouble sees the Southern California artist returning to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon. De Augustine spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination, creating an all-enveloping work that exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. He wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble on his own, shaping the album’s ornately detailed sound by performing on 27 different instruments (including such oddities as a xylophone made of glass, a Mustel celeste and the rare DG-1 Stepp Guitar synthesiser).

“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, devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemise pain into extraordinary beauty. ‘Another Universe’ follows last autumn’s stand-alone double singles ‘27‘ and ‘Hologram‘, also recorded, produced, and mixed by De Augustine.

Photo credit: Pooneh Ghana

High-res images are available here

Pre-order Toil and Trouble here:
https://angelodeaugustine.bandcamp.com/album/toil-and-trouble