Love Aggregates

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 with the likes of xaviersobased and Oklou, along with a slew of other accolades. That came as something of a surprise to White, who didn’t craft the chaotic 8 Tips with a breakthrough in mind. Love Aggregates feels like a chance, for one of the most thrilling musical talents of her generation, at a more deliberate introduction.   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.”  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. “It’s a reminder that new love happens, and it does not replace nor censor the old love, it just aggregates and aggregates,” she says. “And now you have this record that has snapshots from various stages of various loves, from totally abysmal open wounds to adolescent horniness and whatever else. The songs are aggregates of all of it.”  She wanted to write songs that stood on their own two feet, prioritizing sturdy construction over dazzling surface effects. And while she was accustomed to approaching her lyrics with a certain literary distance, now the words were rushing out with newfound pain and anger. White, a musician with a critic’s knowledge of pop history and a writer’s aversion to cliche, was now rushing headlong toward—the horror!—the most stripped-down and personal album of her career. But one listen to Love Aggregates makes clear that it’s something very different from the self-consciously raw Authentic Statement that its backstory might lead you to expect. For starters, there is its sheer sonic variety: “My day at the casino” is all ping-ponging strings, horns, and distortion-fried drums; “Atoll,” with its patiently interlocking keyboard arpeggios and wintry string section, has as much to do with contemporary classical music as the singer-songwriter tradition. Even in the album’s sparer moments, there is always the possibility of some new sound to unexpectedly rotate a song’s feeling by a few degrees, like the piano line that falls like a scarf in the wind on “Health techniques,” or the scraping like a rusty old swingset that echoes throughout “Come 2.” Compared to White’s earlier willfully jarring shifts, Love Aggregates is unified by a certain prismatic quality, its spectrum of color seeming to emanate from a single point of light.   In the album-opening “Reverie for work,” a song White ostensibly wrote about a day job as a barista, we get lines like “If my sweat is just grease in a one-wheeled machine/then I bet I’ll forget when the oils pooling gleam/and I’ll wonder what you mean.” But she’s not too precious to follow those lyrical backflips with a straightforward come-on: “Is it snowing there in Flatbush?/Are you looking for a bed tonight?” goes the song’s lilting refrain. She painstakingly revised the words as she worked, seeking to channel her rawness into writing that lived up to her usual richly suggestive standard. “I was thinking, how can I dull the emo blade?” she says, self-deprecatingly. “There’s nothing worse than, ‘She wrote this album after a hard breakup.’ I tried to treat it like any other new influence in my life. It’s embarrassing to be like, I just learned about jazz, so now all my songs have saxophones. Or, I just got my heart broken, so now all my songs have me crying.”   She was bitter at first, but set against making a bitter record. “My day at the casino,” the song that addresses the specifics of her breakup most directly, contains its fair share of barbs, but its emotional climax is an expression of tenderness for a self-destructive loved one: “We are on your side, baby,” White sings in delicate harmony. “Come outside to greet the day.” She probably couldn’t have made a bitter record if she tried: her melodies are too exuberant, her voice too companionable. Her compositions carry an implicit optimism about the power of music itself: no true cynic could write a tune as crammed with giddy inventions as this,even if its subject matter is addiction and the nihilism and deceit that come with it.   White happily acknowledges her inspirations for the song, which include Queen’s early-’80s funk experiments and Ghostface Killah’s “Wildflower,” a self-flagellating diss track aimed at an ex. She’s drawn to the latter less as an unfettered outburst of rage than for the subtle ways it expresses its anger through writerly craft: outlandish imagery, a thread of regret that emerges gradually alongside the vitriol. It may seem an unlikely influence on White’s multicolored indie pop, but it’s an instructive one: Love Aggregates is an album not about wallowing or seething, but making use of those impulses as raw materials in work that transcends the specificity of its origins, fashioning them into something surprising and new.