Angelo De Augustine - Mirror Mirror

New Music 2026 Q1 W09

Angelo De Augustine – Mirror Mirror

Angelo De Augustine has announced his fifth album, Angel in Plainclothes, out April 24 via Asthmatic Kitty Records. Lead single “Mirror Mirror” is out now, and it’s a departure — not the meditative acoustic folk he’s known for, but something more open and experimental.

The backstory matters here. In early 2022, De Augustine collapsed and was hospitalised with an undiagnosed illness. He spent years relearning how to walk, talk, see, hear, and play music. He finished 2023’s Toil and Trouble mid-recovery, convinced he might not survive. “I had accepted that I was going to die and that I should do all I could to finish the record”, he says. “The experience unfortunately broke me and everything that I thought that I knew or could count on. With this new record, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of who I was and figure out who I am now. 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”.

“Mirror Mirror” came out of a specific experiment. De Augustine was working with a tape machine’s varispeed function, slowing down recordings of a bowed psaltery — a 20th-century zither-like instrument — until it produced an unusual droning texture. Psychedelic electric guitars, relaxed percussion, and layered sound build around it. “The song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching as the structure of a song revealed itself”, he explains. It’s looser and brighter than his earlier work, and that looseness feels deliberate.

Angel in Plainclothes is also the first record in years when De Augustine brought in outside collaborators. Written, recorded, and produced at his Southern California studio A Secret Place, the album features string arranger Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Helado Negro), harpist Leng Bian, vocalist and percussionist Wendy Fraser, Thomas Bartlett (who produced his 2019 breakthrough Tomb, and has worked with St. Vincent and Bebel Gilberto), and Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen), who co-produced and plays drums on “The Cure”. De Augustine will support the album with his first US tour in seven years, with Hannah Frances joining as support — West Coast dates only for now.