Asher White – Love Aggregates

Asher White is just 26 years old, but has been making records—writing, recording, producing, and playing almost everything herself—for over a decade. She’d released two dozen of them on Bandcamp before catching the indie-rock industry’s attention with 2024’s Home Constellation Study and last year’s 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. The latter album, her first for Joyful Noise, zooms from strummy guitar songs to bruising drum’n’bass breakdowns to honest-to-god doom metal riffs. With its dizzy eclecticism and formidable craft the album was a breakthrough for White, earning high praise from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, Hearing Things, Paste and Stereogum, who described Asher as “an Alex G-level prolific talent” and Rolling Stone, who named her to their Future 25 list of the most exciting upcoming artists alongside the likes of xaviersobased and Oklou.

In February, White returned to release a follow up of sorts, a full length cover version of Jessica Pratt’s self-titled debut LP, which was received enthusiastically by Pratt herself and by the press, with Pitchfork saying that White’s “sprawling imagination, sense of self, and creative ambition push these covers into captivating forms.” Today, White is returning to announce her latest LP Love Aggregates which will be released on Joyful Noise on August 28th.

For any other artist, an album like Love Aggregates might come out of a conscious push to treat no idea as off-limits, to make something bold and new. Jubilant art-funk about cocaine addiction—absolutely. Swooning orchestral pop about Jerry Garcia—why not? Rippling electronic noise, jazzy brushed drums, an elderly motorcyclist with dementia, a profoundly emotional bass solo—put them all in one song. There are threadbare folk tunes, glammed-up power-pop bangers, “Sir Duke” horn charts, Morton Feldman string arrangements, layers of guitar feedback like violins made of liquid chrome. Yes, for another artist, Love Aggregates might be the most adventurous album in their catalog. For Asher White, it’s what passes for settling down.

She wrote and recorded her new album while her previous one was gathering momentum, tinkering in the DIY recording studio where she always works, acutely conscious now that people would be listening to whatever she came up with. At around the same time, her years-long romantic relationship ended in a flurry of betrayal and addiction, her first experience of devastating heartbreak. She was determined to present her new audience with an album that felt true to the whole of her artistry as she understood it so far, but also consumed with feelings of a sort that she had no previous cause to explore in her work. “It was the first time that I was like, Oh, someone is going to be hearing these songs,” she says. “And also the first time that I was, like, actually upset while writing them.”

To announce the album White is sharing a single entitled “The eagle is no omen,” and its accompanying video.

To coincide with the announce she is sharing a run of US tour dates scheduled for the fall, alongside the UK run she recently announced around her upcoming appearance at Pitchfork London.

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