Asher White's Short, Strange Trip

On May 16, 2024, I woke up on the floor of a friend’s basement in Cleveland and absentmindedly looked at my phone. There was an email from an address I didn’t recognize, which was not in itself unusual; as a music journalist, I get unsolicited promotional messages from publicists and artists all the time. I was in the middle of a tour with my band that morning, and probably hung over. It was not an ideal time to reach me about anything other than a cup of coffee.

But the subject line of this particular email intrigued me. “Inquiry,” it read, and then, “andy cush vs. the excruciating love of life.” In the tone of an old friend resuming sporadic correspondence, the writer told me what had been going on with her recently: a move to New York, a nasty cold, a comic mishap at a rotisserie chicken joint. She offered me well wishes on tour. And she discussed my work as a writer, which she’d read closely. She quoted a line from a review of a small reissue from several years before, one I’d almost forgotten writing. She drew out a thesis of sorts from other pieces, something about transcendence expressed in sound, and pondered how my apparent interest in the ineffable dovetailed with my life as a player of improvised music. She told me about albums I’d championed that had “changed, ruined, or repaired” her life. Then she did something more familiar to a music journalist unaccustomed to such thorough attention to his work paid by total strangers: She asked me to listen to her new album. 

I was both deeply flattered and mildly freaked out by the care and intensity put into this message, which, through no doing of mine, has already entered the annals of Asher White lore. In a piece about her brilliant new album 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living in Paste that mentions me by name as the recipient, the young art-pop multihyphenate talked about worrying that she’d “blacklisted [herself] from the entire music industry from this Unabomber email.” 

White wasn’t blacklisted, though it did take me a while to listen to Home Constellation Study, the album she dropped in my inbox that day. When I did, it blew me away immediately. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the lushly orchestrated overture and pulse-heightening rush of percussion that opens the album, nor the melange of styles that followed: noise rock blasts, dime-store disco heaters, guitar-pop tunes that tensed up and resolved with Rube Goldberg intricacy and whimsy. The music had an unusual combination of a young person’s dizzy enthusiasm and a veteran’s confident craft. White was 24 at the time, and had been releasing albums on Bandcamp since she was a tween. Home Constellation Study was her 16th. I wrote a rave Pitchfork review, which turned out to be my last before leaving to co-found Hearing Things. White soon signed to Joyful Noise, the label home of fellow purveyors of anything-goes pop destruction like Deerhoof and Marnie Stern. 

8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living does not feel much like a self-conscious followup to a minor breakthrough, perhaps because White had already made it by the time Home Constellation Study found its audience. (The 8 Tips follow-up, too, is now already in the can.) Where the previous album opens with a woosh of forward motion, this one takes its time: a metronome clicks audibly in the background, a synth blinks hesitantly like an old pinball machine coming to life. White, who produces her own music and plays just about everything herself, uses her electronic-acoustic arrangements both to heighten her songs’ effects and to subvert them. As the album draws to a close, “Country Girls” delivers a giant emotional climax and then immediately takes it away, setting its anthemic chorus to guitars that sputter and die out as if piped in via a finicky aux cord. White says, only half jokingly, that she intended this particular production trick as a “whippets simulator,” evoking the way a hit of nitrous can take you from feeling high to hollowed-out in a few seconds flat. Side two of 8 Tips begins with a charred doom-metal instrumental that opens into a delicate ballad. The stunning “Beers With My Name on Them,” one of my favorite songs of the year, begins as frantic power-pop and ends as even more frantic breakbeat techno.

White and I met in person for the first time on Sunday evening, two days after the release of 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. We sat across from each other at a stone chessboard in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, just on the other side of Avenue A from Nightclub 101, the buzzy downtown venue where White would soon recite a monologue about Anna Nicole Smith for a packed room at a reading event stacked with other musician-writers. She’ll be there again tonight—Wednesday, September 17—kicking off a month-long tour in support of 8 Tips. 

White, who dabbled in music criticism a few years back, is an ideal interview subject, excited by big ideas and prone to zigzagging asides, eager to interrogate her own tendencies and motives as an artist where others might play taciturn. Like a true critic, she began by mercilessly dissecting her own new album’s supposed failure to meet the zeitgeist. These days, she’s more interested in playing within the confines of genre rather than in constantly blowing them up. “I don’t know if I would change anything about it, I just think that I, and a bunch of other listeners, seem to be interested in a different thing now: in form and stuff,” she said. “It actually gives you a greater margin for irony and distance and disaffection within it, because everyone’s working within the same premise. I’ve been feeling really cynical about being like, Every song, I’m just going to make it what I want to make. If you just allow yourself to do that, I think you lose something historical. This is pretentious to say, but I’ve been listening to 8 Tips, being like, I actually wish I was more conformist about this.”

White nibbled on dumplings as we spoke, because, she said, eating during the interview made it feel more like we were conducting a magazine profile in the 1970s. Periodically, she gripped the corner of the chessboard with both hands, as if bracing herself against the oncoming force of her own train of thought. Don’t be fooled by the artist’s objections: 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is a marvel.