Asher White: The Best of What's Next

From the beginning of the year, I started seeing Asher White’s name pop up seemingly everywhere. She was on every cool band’s bill, from a night of Godcaster’s residency at Night Club 101 to opening for Black Country, New Road. She signed to Joyful Noise, put out one of the best songs of the summer with “Kratom Headache Girls Night,” and shared her new album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, having already finished the next one. But White never expected to receive this much attention, much less have 8 Tips be her most anticipated album yet.

White, who counts 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living as her 16th album, was churning out music not intending for it to reach a wide audience. She relished the freedom of creating music without being self-conscious about how it would be released, instead following her whims and embracing the imperfections of her work. Everything changed when, last year, White knew she had a great album on her hands with Home Constellation Study, so with nothing to lose, she wrote a “pretty unhinged” email to a Pitchfork writer asking for her record to be considered for a review.

“Maybe this is actually not wise to print, because it’ll encourage people to use this technique, which is, I think, actually more of a psychic form of terrorism than it is professional advancement. But I wrote this 2,000-word email to Andy Cush, whom I didn’t know, but I knew that he reviewed stuff,” White tells me at Misfit, the Kratom bar that inspired “Kratom Headache Girls Night.” She did extensive research on Cush, mentioning the writer’s own music as Domestic Drafts and his bass playing in Garcia Peoples in the email. “I went really deep. It was so creepy,” the musician recalls. “I was like, ‘Here’s what I’m noticing about the way you play bass.’ White also delved into how her music aligned with what Cush likes, based on what she could tell through his review choices. But after writing it, White worried that she had “blacklisted [herself] from the entire music industry from this Unabomber email.”

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It shouldn’t have worked, but she charmed Cush, who responded that he had written a review that would be published soon after. Getting the high score of 8.0 changed her career. Now, for the first time, she had an audience, and White used it to her advantage. She leveraged it to secure a record deal with Joyful Noise and hired a publicist. “It’s cynical to think about the stepping stones of the indie-rock industrial complex and how one thing serves as a prerequisite to another thing,” reflects White. “And then you are just stacking these documents in order to sign the next thing. It feels nihilistic, almost, that that is actually the way that it happened. It didn’t have that much of an impact on me emotionally or personally; other than that, it felt like a good signal that I can keep doing what I’m doing.”

I joke to her that accomplishments like the Pitchfork review are the power of the dolls, as another friend involved in New York City’s music scene emailed a well-known venue asking to be listed last-minute for a sold-out show, writing that the “trans community would so appreciate it,” and it surprisingly did the trick. “It makes sense because—and this is dangerous but good, controversial territory—the trans girl email is a really formidable medium,” White tells me. “It’s just the way that trans girls also ask for drinks at the bar, which is like, you’re equipping some semblance of profound discomfort in your body, but also this weird, ancient, and ingrained sense of propriety over yourself with Betty Boop aesthetics. It’s very dangerous. We’ve been given a horrible, flirtatious key to getting what we want. This is like Tucker Carlson’s nightmare, saying this.” While this tactic worked for White, she doesn’t advise anyone else to follow in her footsteps and reach out to the writer. “Definitely not Andy Cush. You can only do it once per journalist. It has to be you now, or Liz Pelly.”

Lately, White has been thinking about what constitutes a “good album” in an ever-changing media landscape. She mentions Geese frontman Cameron Winter’s debut solo album, Heavy Metal, which was released last December to glowing critic reviews but little fanfare, only to become a major phenomenon a few months later, with Winter selling out Carnegie Hall. As an artist trying to stay afloat in the ever-changing zeitgeist, White has been wondering how 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is going to be received. “Kratom Headache Girls Night” is a ray of sunshine in song form, poppy and inviting. 8 Tips is not that. It’s experimental and playful, with singles that range from sounding like doom metal-meets-Brazilian Tropicália and circus music (“Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab”) to garage rock transforming into industrial techno (“Beers with my name on them”). Even its gentle moments, like “Voice Memo,” sound haunting.

White recalls that she wrote “Kratom Headache Girls Night” as a “very steadfast and spirited crafts project of making a fucking pop song that was good,” which was part of the first album made with her newfound fanbase in mind. “It was an experiment to be like, ‘Well, people, if this gets a good response, I’m in trouble.’ And if people think this is gay and stupid, then good, because I have these new metal singles coming out later.” Unfortunately (or fortunately) for White, it was well-received. When I ask about whether she’s worried about following up a poppy single with an album that’s nothing like it—and that doesn’t contain the song—White admits that she’s “so scared.”

“I’m horrified. I’m so fucked up. I’m shivering and quaking. I am a-tremble. Sincerely,” she adds. Given that it’s her first time in this position, where she has to deal with eyes being on her, the fear of not knowing how it’ll go can be overwhelming. She explains that, by the time that Home Constellations Study was reviewed by Pitchfork, she had already finished 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. “I would not have made it had I known that Home Constellation Study was going to get reviewed,” she says. “I did not think that it would be the one that would get thrown into the press cycle. It’s not a promotable album. And it’s not a breakthrough album. This is not to say it’s not good. But it’s not a sophomore album, which I think it can be pitched as [despite the breadth of my work], and it’s certainly not a debut album. It feels like a late-career album to me, because it is.” She teases that at least, if her new fans aren’t into 8 Tips because it’s too alienating, there is another pop album on the way featuring “Kratom,” called Love Aggregates.

8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is a delightfully disorienting album, both in terms of its eclectic sound and lyrics. White blends her own stories with characters going through personal crises: a “girlboss” who desperately wants reassurance that she isn’t contributing to gentrification after purchasing and fixing up a home in a cheap neighborhood; an imagined, different perspective on the story of Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, where the wife of a French Foreign Legion soldier begins to suspect that her husband has had a homoerotic relationship while stationed in Djibouti; and fictionalized perspectives from late literary icons Clarice Lispector and Eve Babitz.

Speaking on the balancing act of interweaving the narratives, White notes that she has always written songs that toggle between being inspired by the pieces of media she’s interested in and the emotions that consume her. “I usually temper one or the other to find a midpoint, thinking that a good song is both referential and earnest, but also self-aware,” she says. “I think I was trying to experiment with swaying more heavily in either direction. So there are some songs on here that are super, super conceptual in narrative and ornate in their construction. And there are songs that are really, really heart-on-sleeve, eyeliner running, female desperation, hysteria.” Even when White is writing from a personal place, her lyrics still feel cryptic. As someone who had always written for an audience of herself, White’s songs feel like undecipherable messages kept for her to cherish, like a diary written in code. When I point this out to her, she asks me if I consider “Falls,” the final song on the record, to be “emotionally transparent.”

I admit to her that I didn’t read it that way at first, as she sings about the process of preparing a home for its next guests (“We strip the paint and sweep the dirt / The knowing last, the house first / Somewhere else will we stay”). But as I pull out the lyrics sheet during our conversation (with White joking that we’re making a Genius Verified video), I can see hints of the deeply personal, emotional aspects White put into it: “Happy as I’ve ever been / Tarry yet a little while,” she sings as she closes the chapter on 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. “For some reason, this is the most naked song that I’ve ever made,” she says. “And then I play it for people, and they’re like, ‘What is it about? Is it about real estate?’ I guess I don’t know the extent to which little in-jokes or riddles and stuff are totally opaque to the listener. I’m like, this is the saddest song ever. To me, this is the most direct and excruciatingly finger in the wound [song I’ve written].”

“Falls” was written as an ode to Providence, a city she called home for five years before moving to New York City. White, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs of Evanston, studied sculpture at RISD, a major she chose because she was “not very good in high school” and wanted to study something other than music, so she wouldn’t find her passion to be “burdensome or obligatory.” Her plan after graduation was to move back to the Midwest, inspired by bands like Horsegirl and Lifeguard, who were slightly younger than her and “developing this really beautiful utopian scene in Chicago.” But by the time she graduated, she realized she didn’t really have any friends who were still in her hometown; most of her friends were in Providence. And Providence happened to be affordable, with rent only costing $500 for a room. But despite building her adult life there, White had to eventually leave behind the community she felt at home in after massive rent hikes. “The span that I was in Providence was the exact five to six-year span that it went from being a pretty neglected, New England, post-industrial city to new development hell, scary neoliberal mayor, creepy investment world,” she recalls. “It really changed. It looks like Williamsburg.” It became untenable for White. After realizing that she would now have to pay New York City prices in Providence, she thought, why not actually try and hack it in New York City?

Now with a year in New York under her belt and a new life as a no-longer-anonymous rising star, White learned that success comes through risks. Despite her fears of what’s to come with 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, perhaps the unexpected risk of putting out an unconventional post-breakout album is what’ll bring the biggest reward of all: a loyal fanbase that embraces whatever magic Asher White conjures, no matter how many sonic twists come along the way.

Tatiana Tenreyro is Paste‘s associate music editor, based in New York City. You can also find her writing at SPIN, NME, PAPER Magazine, The A.V. Club, and other outlets.

Asher White: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: God Help the Girl, Jim O'Rourke, Sufjan Stevens