Angelo De Augustine tackles the supernatural on "The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill"

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.

"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."

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.

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.'"

Toil and Trouble is De Augustine's first solo work since Tomb back in 2019. It also follows up A Beginner's Mind – his 2021 collaborative album with Sufjan Stevens.