On a chilly Tuesday in November, Rockefeller Center swarms with tourists and holiday shoppers. Somewhere in 30 Rock, Jimmy Fallon is bantering with Ariana Grande. But underground, beneath the marquees and Christmas lights, Asher White is onstage at Rough Trade’s new store, subverting the corporate environs with a set that swerves from tender indie-pop to pummeling doom-metal to psychedelic reveries and back.
“It sucks if you just wanted to buy a Randy Newman record today,” White jokes between songs, clad in a green dress and Greta Van Fleet hat. “The lights are off. How are you gonna know if it’s ‘near-mint’?’”
Yet the modest crowd has clearly assembled for one reason: to see this multi-instrumentalist wunderkind perform with her band. White, who self-released a dozen home-recorded albums on Bandcamp before she’d even graduated college, is capping off a remarkable year. In 2025, she signed to the indie label Joyful Noise Recordings, toured with Deerhoof, opened for Black Country, New Road, rocked the trans-rights festival Liberation Weekend (White has been an openly trans artist since high school), and released 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, a thrillingly tempestuous work that, by most estimates, is her 16th album. By year’s end, she had already completed two more: one composed of Jessica Pratt covers, the other sparkling indie-pop originals. Does she ever slow down?
“I’m the opposite of a perfectionist,” White, 26, admits when we meet up in early January. “It’s hard to hold back.”
As for her recent success, “nothing has changed,” she says, “except when I see friends I haven’t seen in a while, they’re like, ‘You’re really blowing up!’”
We meet at Tashkent, an Uzbek-themed supermarket in Brighton Beach that White has frequented since moving to Brooklyn in 2024. It’s an odd place for an interview; why, I wonder, has White summoned me to this bustling grocery store with no tables or chairs? But the songwriter is mad for the voluminous hot bar station. She fills containers with lamb manti, spinach chebureki, and Turkish salad, and rhapsodizes about her fondness for Uzbek food. “It is literally the most insane confluence of flavors and cuisines,” she raves as we sit and eat outside, by the barren beach, in 36-degree weather. “There’s just so much going on there.”
There’s a metaphor there for White’s music, which — like that sprawling buffet — overwhelms the senses with a kaleidoscopic array of textures and possibilities. Browsing through her Bandcamp archives, you might stumble upon a 2014 ambient album incorporating field recordings from an Icelandic vacation. You might fall in love with 2021’s American Motel History, a “shoegrass” album inspired by Thelma & Louise and bursting with enough melancholy banjo to make Sufjan jealous. And you might be awed by 2024’s Home Constellation Study, an album of ornate folk-pop gems whose liner notes credit White with “exploding sounds, fake mellotron, glitter, glockenspiel, granular synthesis, hand percussion,” and more. Though White recorded and produced all this herself, in between classes and day jobs, the music never sounds solitary.
That 2024 album, Home Constellation Study, released on Ba Da Bing Records, got enough critical attention to boost her profile and audience. Still, she says she’d be releasing music at a feverish pace with or without any external validation.
“It’s sort of nice to have put out a lot of music, fruitlessly, because I can trust the fact that I will do it no matter what,” White says. “For like 10 years, there was not any returns on it. I expect really nothing from it. It’s an extracurricular thing I do when I get off my day job. I don’t feel that I, like, deserve stardom for making music immediately. But I’ll take it!”
In person, White is loquacious and witty, armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and able to hold court on seemingly any subject, from Joanna Newsom deep cuts to urban planning and why New York is the closest Americans get to “real cities” like Marrakesh. She’s dressed colorfully, wearing a thrift-store sweater, floral capris on top of dark pants, and a baseball hat from Zabar’s.
She is also prone to dramatic displays of self-deprecation, particularly where 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is concerned. She describes the album as “an insular, sort of masturbatory project” and claims to be “mortified” that it was released after her breakout moment, when eyes were newly fixed on her.
“It’s a very monastic and sort of intellectual album that does not yield playlistable songs,” White says, sounding like the music critic she once yearned to be, “nor songs that people will have particularly profound emotional experiences to.”
Adrian Ocone*
The album is more abrasive than its predecessor, with zigzagging genre shifts and a sputtering single called “Beers with My Name on Them” that lurches into a heady drum ‘n’ bass freakout. But it also has moments of beauty, such as the spare, elegiac ballad “Falls.” It hardly sounds like a career-ender.
By White’s account, she recorded the album before realizing Home Constellation Study would attract attention. She was “living totally alone in Providence,” embarking on “a weird, self-imposed graduate project” that involved watching Claire Denis films and reading urbanism theory. “When I finished it, I was like, I think music guys will like this. And I bet if I sent it to a label, they’ll listen to it.” Joyful Noise not only listened but opted to release it and hire a publicist for a marketing push. “And I was like oh, no, no!” White recalls. “I think a lot of people are gonna listen to this once and be like, ‘That’s pretty cool. I don’t have any reason to listen to it again.’”
“But now I have a record that’s just… it’s just perfect,” she adds, referring to her follow-up. “And it’s gonna rocket me to stardom.”
BORN IN 2000, Asher White is as terminally online as any musician who self-released Tim Hecker-inspired ambient drones at 14. As a preteen, growing up near Chicago, she scoured YouTube, getting heavily into Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Excited by experimental artists like Pharmakon, she began attending underground noise shows in the city at a precociously young age.
“I was the young, weird kid,” she recalls. “Everyone was like, ‘Why are you here?’”
Yet spend five minutes talking to her and it’s clear she harbors a deep fascination with old things, tangible things — emblems of culture that existed before her time. During high school, she worked at a book and music store outside Chicago, where she often found herself combing through stacks of donated records. “I was doing house calls — going to people’s storage units when their grandma died. Or people would come in and be like, ‘Here’s my collection,’” White recalls. “I got beautiful, kaleidoscopic windows into other people’s music collections from decades ago.”
White spent hours sifting through deeply uncool vinyl — “like, Billy Joel records or forgotten private-press folk” — and finding unexpected transcendence. “It made me very anti-snob,” she says. “It made me feel like basically every record that you come across has at least three seconds of something really magical on it.”
Later, as a sculpture major at RISD, she worked in the archives as a book processor and mender, where one of her duties was culling library books that hadn’t been checked out in 50 years — an experience which in turn informed her visual art. “You can see the intervals between years and the due dates,” White says. “It’s a beautiful, sort of haunting object about obsolescence. I really loved that job.” (A more recent stint at the Strand, in 2024, proved less pleasurable; White claims to have been fired from the iconic New York bookstore for minor infractions such as reading at the info desk.)
White’s affection for antique objects seeps through in the ramshackle charms of her music. The songs burst with material textures and oddball instruments, as though their creator just robbed a kooky composer’s estate sale. Listen to a song like “Mare,” the swooning centerpiece of 2023’s New Excellent Woman, and you can hear so many bits of instrumental detritus poking through the folk-pop melody — twinkling glockenspiels, clanging percussion, intermittent banjo — all imparting a sense of retro tactility.
“I really believe that an object that produces a sound has the potential to be transcendent. Even if that sound is digital and tinny and shitty,” White says. “The recordings I love are ones where you can really hear the material qualities of the instruments.”
For years, White has made a habit of trawling eBay and Craigslist in search of old banjos, vintage amplifiers, any manner of random instruments. She’s currently on the hunt for an early-2000s keyboard “that you might have in music class in a public school”; high-end gear doesn’t interest her. “I am not a gear head and really am uninterested in equipment or instruments that have empirical value,” White tells me. “I’ll truly take whatever.”
How she learned to master all these instruments seems a mystery even to her. Did she take lessons? “No. I was just… born perfect,” she quips. She taught herself drums in middle school and became “inexplicably very good.” Within a few years, she began messing around with GarageBand on her dad’s computer and learning how to record music.
These days, White’s assemblage of instruments lives at her rented studio in Providence, a half-basement room crowded with rickety pianos and tangled microphone cords, nestled in an unrenovated industrial building. White has recorded all her albums since New Excellent Woman there, using a Zoom LiveTrak L-12 mixer, her most expensive purchase to date. The space itself costs $100 a month, far cheaper than a comparable facility in New York, so she travels back to Providence to record when her day job (working for a wall-painting company) allows.
At times, White’s lo-fi creations evoke the feeling of listening to Elephant 6 groups like Neutral Milk Hotel or the Olivia Tremor Control in the Nineties — the anything-goes psych-pop arrangements; the vacillation between melody and noise; the awe of hearing an inventive songwriter working with crude materials yet able to turn those limitations into an advantage. It’s the sound of unbridled creativity.
But Elephant 6 was a collective, and Asher White is one person. Though she tours with a small band, she still performs and records nearly every instrument herself on record. “It’s just faster if I do it that way,” White says. “And I don’t have to be tyrannical about someone else.”
IN 2023, WHITE was living in Providence, having recently graduated from RISD, when she experienced one of those fortuitous encounters musicians dream about. She was working at a bookstore in town. By chance, Ben Goldberg, the founder of Ba Da Bing Records, had just moved into an apartment above the store.
“I remember Asher from the first time I visited,” Goldberg says, “because she’s like an electric current of energy just wandering around.”
He and White chatted about music, and he mentioned that he ran a label. When he heard New Excellent Woman a while later, he immediately wanted to put it out. “She had absorbed so many different influences and listened to so much music and retained this wholly new creation in her that was just completely unique,” he says.
Released in May 2023, New Excellent Woman became White’s first album issued by a label. It’s a lush and intricate work, ornamented with pillowy strings and baroque passages. Alternately referencing Everclear and ancient Greek texts, its impressionistic lyrics evoke the agony and ecstasy of messy relationships, decaying apartments, post-coital confusion. “It is very fruity music but mostly about infrastructural failure/kabbalism/bad sex,” White informed me, in an unsolicited email, in 2023. She insists, three years later, that the album is “pretty much entirely just about the development of New Haven.” (White is “emotionally moved” by infrastructure and urban planning.)
After two albums with Ba Da Bing, White signed to Joyful Noise last year, and the label has proven amenable to her left-field impulses. That includes putting out a track-by-track tribute to Jessica Pratt’s 2012 debut of mystical neo-folk transmissions. After growing obsessed with Pratt’s album during a frigid Providence winter, White began recording its songs in 2023 as a procrastination exercise.
Two years later, at dinner with Joyful Noise representatives, she mentioned the project and pretended it was done; the label offered to release it right away. “In actuality, I had recorded maybe two songs,” White admits. “I was like, OK, I have to hole up in my studio and take a bunch of Adderall and create this Jessica Pratt record.”
Digitally released on Feb. 4, it’s a bizarre but compelling experiment; White unfastens the songs from their austere minimalism and gives them a raucous remodeling. And yes, Pratt has heard it. “White’s curiously inventive renditions took me by surprise,” the singer-songwriter said in a statement. “A broad sweep stylistically and production-wise. Not just homage, but a record in its own right.”
In typical fashion, White has already completed her next album, Love Aggregates. But being part of a label means hewing to a release schedule, and so Love Aggregates won’t come out until the fall. Which, for an artist accustomed to finishing an album and uploading it to Bandcamp that same night, is an interminable wait.
“I have to just hang out with it for a long time,” White bemoans. “Which is horrifying to me. The reason I was producing a record every six months is so I could wash the taste of the last one out.”
