Asher White – Kratom Headache Girls Nights
Today, Asher White is announcing her signing to Joyful Noise and to mark the occasion she’s sharing a new single “Kratom Headache Girls Night.”
A NYC-by-way-of-Rhode Island multi-instrumentalist, writer and visual artist, Asher has rapidly come to broader attention over the last year following the release of her 2024 LP Home Constellation Study followed by a collaborative single with Caroline Rose and Eli Winter for the TRANSA compilation that came out in December.
As a multi-instrumentalist and producer, Asher White’s auteurish pop vision is vulgar and transcendent: marrying skittering noise with swooping strings, lively banjo with blasts of feedback, dissonant flutes with elegant bossa nova. Since the early 2010s she has developed a sprawling discography that spans experimental drone, tropicalia, noise rock, and folk. Her heartfelt and compulsively inclusive aesthetic is often informed by her transness, her Jewish spirituality, and her ongoing negotiations with hedonism. Her music runs in parallel to her work as a visual artist and writer; her first book was published by Atlantic Filtration Systems in 2024.
“Kratom Headache Girls Night” is a testament to White’s deft touch as a songwriter, and her ambition as a producer and arranger. She takes the chronicle of a night out at a Bushwick kratom bar and imbues it with layers of reflection that seem to pull the whole world in, while her arrangement taps the gentle maximalism of Sufjan Stevens and blends it with the glitchy, internet-addled approaches of artists like Fire-Toolz and Water From Your Eyes.
Asher says of the song:
This is a relatively straightforward song about Hanging with the Homies, which I find to be a classic and timeless premise for many good songs. i’ve found, however, that recently there’s a dark cloud of end times that hangs out with us, of course, and there’s a new psychic puzzle of trying to have fun despite this. this song toys a little with the membrane between losing-yourself-in-rapturous-experience-of-friend-love and panic-about-the-immediate-future-on-an-urgent-material-level; sometimes a feeling of doom can even facilitate a moment of heightened presentness. so there’s some real Perks of Being a Wallflower -style images that result from me discovering I have the group of friends and lovers I’d wanted my entire childhood. the kratom bar in question is Misfit on Central Ave in Bushwick and we tend to go there a few times a month and it’s a real blast.
Tour Dates
4/22 New York, NY — Night Club 101 w/ Godcaster
5/2 New York, NY — Union Pool w/ Lookers, BABAS
5/9 New York, NY — Bowery Ballroom w/ Black Country, New Road
5/27 Providence, RI — Lost Bag w/ Stander
5/31 Washington, DC — Liberation Weekend
6/25 Boston, MA— Crystal Ballroom w/ Deerhoof
6/26 Hamden, CT— Space Ballroom w/ Deerhoof
6/27 Amherst, MA — The Drake w/ Deerhoof
#trasherwhite