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In Asher White’s hands, melody can seem to do almost anything: It can vault across baroque chord progressions, bridge the distance between genres, chart a course from the doldrums to redemption and back. On Love Aggregates, her latest record and her second full-length release this year, her nimble voice leads you through the densest arrangements, even when the music swallows most of her words. It is a surprise, then, to go back over the 26-year-old musician’s 27 (yes, 27) releases over the past decade or so and find that she began her recording career not as a singer-songwriter but as something more like a collector and designer of sounds, speedrunning through field recordings, glitched soundscapes, and minimalist synth pieces. When her voice finally appears on record, some nine releases in, it is on a collection of basement-pop songs that the then-16-year-old artist explained came from a few years of “collecting fragments of lyrics, melodies, arrangements, and cool sounds.” You might be forgiven for thinking this would be just another experiment.
White seems to rate herself, unfairly, more highly as a producer than as a songwriter. In an interview from earlier this year, in advance of her song-for-song cover of Jessica Pratt’s self-titled album, she said: “I always have more production ideas than I do good songs that I’ve written, I don’t really write that many good songs. I like making beats.” Jessica Pratt was White’s way of getting back to the joy of tinkering with sounds in the studio after the praise she received for 2025’s 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. By her account, this attention was unexpected; she was just doing her magpie thing, collecting shiny bits of melody and noise and arranging them into songs. Cognizant for the first time that she had a real audience, and amid a breakup and a move from her longtime home base of Providence, Rhode Island to Brooklyn, White set out to write a more careful and deliberate follow-up.
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You can read the title of that follow-up, Love Aggregates, as a verb phrase, testifying to the way disparate memories and impressions can somehow, over time, transform into love. You can also read it as a noun phrase, which conjures the image of some cosmic composite substance made from many people’s individual loves. White’s album is about both. It is about love aggregating and disaggregating. On “My day at the casino,” over a relaxed groove, White replays fragments of conversation and imagery from the end of a relationship—someone is being a sore winner; someone is burying parking tickets in a drawer—before, as she sings strainingly, “it starts to fall apart.” But from the wreckage, something beautiful and unexpected emerges: a parade of horns charting a bright new line across the song’s main progression. Melody points the way out. It is also the kintsugi seam that sutures together moments from the loves of others: “I just want my son to be chiller than me,” White sings on “Jerryboy,” ventriloquizing Jerry Garcia’s mother; “I’m a real speed demon,” she sings on “Memory patient (Motor Cycle Angel),” from the perspective of an elderly biker suffering from dementia.
Many of the songs on Love Aggregates inhabit the point of breakdown, right before the way out appears. White is a restless arranger; she likes to periodically yank out the rhythmic bedrock and leave a song suspended over the abyss. Sometimes this kills the momentum or makes things feel slightly disjointed, as on the searching opening track “Reverie for Work,” which features a gorgeous lilting vocal that is nonetheless undercut by some jerky transitions between parts. Still, much of the time these controlled implosions are occasions for feats of songwriting bravura, as though White is testing her songs’ ability to withstand attack. Splice together the first 45 seconds of “Stage Diva” and another 30 from its end, and it would be one of the greatest power-pop songs of the past several years. But White halts the song abruptly in the middle, peeling back the arrangement until only a backward piano remains behind her voice, and then she builds it up and back down a few more times, bringing the guitars and drums in and out. The song holds up, and what could have been a relentless melodic assault gets time to breathe and develop.
White’s gifts for indelible melody and surprising arrangement harmonize just as well in quieter moments. The gnomic “Atoll,” which is in part about all the things that the love aggregators can’t tally—“No one will tell you what happened/And they won’t write it down”—emerges from billows of strings, which then merge in turn with squealing feedback, before vanishing again behind the vocals. The storm advances and subsides; the mystery unfolds and dissipates. White, ever an optimist, salvages a consoling truth from it all: “Oh, but I was yours for a little while.”
