Asher White

For any other artist, an album like Asher White’s 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.

White is 25 years old and 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. Its dizzy eclecticism and formidable craft landed her on Rolling Stone’s Future 25 list.

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.

Much more than anger, or even sadness, Love Aggregates sounds like the flickers of wild possibility that you may receive from time to time in the midst of despair, the glimpses of future freedom on the horizon. CitiBikes floating at night in “White castle sad”; the singer’s hair fluttering “like receipts in the wind” in “Reverie for work.” The Aggregates in the album’s title has to do with White’s sense of love as a continuum, and can be taken either as a verb or a plural noun.