The singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine makes his studio return with his new record, Angel in Plainclothes, which will be released April 24 via Asthmatic Kitty Records. The artist also shared the first single "Mirror Mirror", as well as upcoming dates for a small tour across the West Coast.

Listen to "Mirror Mirror" below:

Angel in Plainclothes is Angel De Augustine's first record since 2023's Toil and Trouble, which came at a particularly rough moment in the artist's career. As he recovered from a sudden bout of illness in the hospital in late 2022 — a journey that required him to re-learn how to walk, talk, hear, and play music again — he found himself fixating on his darkest moments. "I had accepted that I was going to die and that I should do all I could to finish the record,” he shares. "I didn't believe that I was going to survive the illness, let alone ever make music again. The experience unfortunately broke me and everything that I thought that I knew or could count on."

This new record, however, is a story of healing, of working with his creative partners for the first time in years, opening himself up musically, and reigniting an energy within himself. "With this new record, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of who I was and figure out who I am now," he explains. "I am on a journey where I feel like I may have been given a second chance at life, and I’d like to live it."

The new single "Mirror Mirror", for instance, departs from De Augustine's previous meditative, internal, acoustic folk sound with an atmospheric, multi-layered, and tonally bright sound scape. It notably features a relaxing percussion section, psychedelic electric guitars, and the bowed psaltery, a 20th-Century type of zither that sounds like a violin.

The artist notes the freedom in his approach to structure: "I was messing around with the tape machine’s varispeed function," he says, "seeing what would happen if I slowed down what I’d recorded on the bowed psaltery, creating an unusual droning noise." He continues, "The song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching as the structure of a song revealed itself."

To support the new record, Angelo De Augustine will be going on a brief tour, with Hannah Frances supporting. He'll be traveling to select cities in his home state of California, Oregon, and Washington. It will be his first tour in seven years.

Angel in Plainclothes is out April 24. Pre-order here. Official tracklist:

1. Empty Shell
2. Pet Cemetery
3. Spirit of The Unknown
4. The Cure
5. Mirror Mirror
6. Cosmic Ride
7. The Universe Was Our Mother
8. With a Love So Kind
9. Pictures On My Wall
10. Goodbye Baby Blue

Tour dates:

05/01 Los Angeles, CA @ Sid the Cat Auditorium
05/02 San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Music Hall
05/05 Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
05/06 Seattle, WA @ Triple Door

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