THE START OF THE LAST OF MY LIFE.

The very first line on Archangel It hits like a quiet bomb.

This is the start of the last of my life.

No slow buildup. No easing in.

A sentence so heavy it practically buckles under its own weight and yet, it’s whispered like a secret he wasn’t supposed to tell you.

Michael Auble wrote that line while walking alone on the Ocean City boardwalk. It was winter. Everything was quiet. He had just finished clawing his way out of student loan debt — two years of pushing himself to the edge just to survive.

And when he finally got there? When he was supposed to feel proud, free, relieved?

He felt...exhausted.

Not joy. Not hope. Just a kind of emptiness that surprised even him.

He’d burned through everything just to reach the starting line, and suddenly didn’t know if he even wanted to run the next race.

Like the moment you finish a marathon and realize your body’s still trying to remember how to breathe.

That’s where Archangel begins. Not in chaos or crisis, but in that disorienting quiet that comes after the storm. The kind that forces you to sit with what’s left and figure out if any of it still feels like you.

This isn’t a breakup album or a comeback, it’s something closer to a confession.

And to really understand it, to feel where it’s coming from, you have to go back.

Before the debt.

Before the boardwalk.

Before the lyric.

Back to where music first started keeping him alive.

THE BAND ROOM BUILT HIM

Before the releases, there was a cherry-red drum kit sitting quietly in the corner of Michael Auble’s childhood home.

It belonged to his father, a drummer in Atlantic City’s DIY scene, long before Michael ever picked up a stick.

The kit never got put away. It just lived there. Waiting.

And eventually, like the name they both share, Michael picked it up too.

It causes constant confusion for legal entities, which is a win in my book.

There’s no alias. No stage name. No persona separating the man from the music.

From the beginning, he’s made it clear: what you hear is authentically me, and nothing else.

Still, drums weren’t the first stop.

In fourth grade, he picked up a trumpet, mostly because he thought three keys would be easy to master.

(They weren’t.)

By eighth grade, something deeper had taken root: music wasn’t just an activity, it was how he made his first real friends. It was how he started to feel like himself.

That’s the pattern, he says all the most important people in his life have come to him through music.

By high school, he was all in. Joined marching band. Became drum major by junior year.

After school, he played in every group he could. Started teaching himself “every instrument under the sun.” And like so many kids who fall hard for music, he went full Beatles-mode.

They weren’t just a favorite, they were scripture.

Music has been my oxygen source for decades now.

But here’s the turning point: he didn’t actually start writing his own songs until after high school.

That summer, right before college, something shifted. Writing became survival, a way to process life while it was still happening.

He kept releasing music through college — all self-recorded, all self-produced.

And through it all, one thing stayed constant:

Music wasn’t just the thing that saved him.

It was the thing that built him.

THE COLLABORATOR-TURNED-CONFESSOR

Michael’s musical career actually didn’t begin in a band.

It began alone.

My artistic career actually began solo, before I ever joined any other project. And for this, I have always been eternally grateful.

That independence helped shape a style that was fully his own — not borrowed, not filtered, not bound by someone else’s vision. So when the pandemic brought him back into orbit with old marching band friends, it wasn’t a surrender. It was an expansion.

He joined Away Game on bass, and not long after, Molly Ringworm invited him in on drums.

Now, I’m lucky to work with so many diverse and talented acts that recognize me not just as an interpreter of their works, but as a great friend as well.

That line says everything. These weren’t side gigs. They were relationships. Collaborations rooted in trust. The kind that made him feel like a real contributor, not just someone keeping time, but someone seen.

Especially in Molly Ringworm, where he finally found the confidence he never quite had behind the kit.

Through their support, I finally began to feel capable of developing a comfort and confidence in my drumming that was truly my own.

But still, even while helping others build their worlds, there was a growing sense that something personal hadn’t been said. That somewhere beneath the basslines and arrangements, his own story was still waiting to come out.

That’s where Archangel comes in.

It’s not a break from collaboration, it’s a return to the voice that made all of it possible in the first place.

Archangel has indeed felt like an important return to my own voice after an electrically eclectic year contributing towards many others’ artistic visions.

This wasn’t a record made for someone else.

It was made because it had to be.

A RECORD MADE OF YEARS

Archangel came from a whole lifetime's worth of moments — scattered voice memos, years-old drafts, flashes of clarity, quiet breakdowns, and that last little lyric you find under the bed when you’re moving out.

These tracks were stitched together over maaaaaany many different sections of my life.

Some songs date back to before the pandemic. Others are so fresh, the ink still feels warm. But it wasn’t until October 2024, when he wrote The One, that it finally clicked. The story had an ending. The letter had its stamp.

That was the missing piece, before I could begin sending it.

If his past solo records felt like snapshots, Archangel is the whole reel. He designed the tracklist in emotional dyads — pairs of songs that live in tension with one another. Start and You Never. Cut It Out and Something Done. Each one carrying the other’s weight.

To me, every pair of songs forms its own thematic ‘dyad.’ Like a record full of double A-side singles.

This is the most deliberate he’s ever been with his sound and it shows.

He’s come a long way since Just Another Day, which was literally recorded using Voice Memos on his iPhone and dragged into Audacity.

Quite admirably, I might add.

But Archangel isn’t just clearer because of better tech.

It’s clearer because he is.

So much has happened, and all of these experiences have only strengthened my conviction in just putting it all out there, leaving nothing unsaid behind.

That’s the real difference.

If Just Another Day was jaded and hungry, a kid clawing for recognition, Archangel is something quieter. More whole. Still burning, but softer around the edges. Like a person who isn’t trying to prove they survived anymore. Just someone ready to say what it cost.

REAL NAME. REAL NERVES. REAL ART.

Michael Auble isn’t a stage name. It’s not a character he steps into when the mic turns on. It’s just... him.

I was very deliberate in choosing my own name over any project/stage name for my music; I wanted there to be no question from the beginning that what you are hearing is all authentically me, and nothing else.

That decision sets the tone for everything.

There’s no mask. No ironic detachment. Every lyric, every arrangement, every flaw is stitched in on purpose, not because it’s trendy to be vulnerable, but because there was never going to be another option.

That doesn’t mean he’s always comfortable taking up space. He’s the kind of artist who loves performing, but sometimes feels like he disappears the second the music stops.

Sometimes my solo music feels much more like an introspective retreat inward than any emergence outward.

Marketing, for example, doesn’t come easy. Unless it’s made into art. That’s where he’s found power again — in packaging, in design, in how the album itself looks when you hold it in your hands. It’s why every visual for Archangel carries meaning. Even the cover.

It’s a sketch of Michael’s face, unfinished. You can see the tired eyes. And whether it was intentional or not, there’s a faint stroke across his cheek that reads like a tear.

It’s not dramatic. It’s just real.

Like someone caught mid-sentence. Still working through it.

He likens it to Shelley’s Ozymandias — that “colossal wreck” of something ancient and powerful, now fading. Except this isn’t a ruin. It’s a beginning that just hasn’t finished becoming itself yet.

And when it comes to playing Archangel live? That’s still in the works. The songs are raw. The stories are close. Trust is something he’s rebuilding carefully.

But the dream is there: a full band, live shows, the kind of communal catharsis that only happens when you're surrounded by people who get it.

He's just not rushing. Not forcing anything.

This album wasn’t meant to be shouted, it was meant to be heard in the right setting, in the right way.

WHAT HE LEFT, WHAT HE FOUND

There’s no big finale here. No explosive resolution.

Just a quiet decision:

To quit the teaching job that was draining him.

To move to Philly.

To rebuild his life around music — fully, this time.

That’s what Archangel really is.

Not a project, but a letting go.

Not a beginning, not an end — just a breath.

A letter he’d been writing for years.

To exes. To friends. To the versions of himself he kept shedding along the way.

That last song wasn’t just a closer, it was the thing that allowed the rest to exist.

Once it was written, everything else made sense. The album could finally be sent.

And now that it’s out in the world, he’s not in a rush to do it again.

The point was to get everything out at once that I had been holding back.

He’s still writing, of course — the pace has never really slowed. But what comes next will likely be quieter. Smaller in shape. He’s thinking about going back to EPs like Widowmaker and The Hanged Man, where the framework is tighter and the stories more focused.

No pressure. No timeline. No spectacle. Just presence.

Michael Auble is widely known as someone who throws caution to the wind when it comes to guarding his heart. He doesn’t believe in protecting his emotional energy and frankly, he doesn’t want to.

That vulnerability? That’s where the music lives.

That’s what Archangel is made of.

And whatever comes next, it’ll carry that same pulse: unfiltered, unguarded, and all his.

WHERE TO FIND HIM

IG: @aublemusic

YT: @michaelauble

Spotify: @michaelauble

Bandcamp: @michaelauble