GENRE: Rock
LABEL: Joyful Noise
REVIEWED: 24th September, 2025
RATING: 7.4/10
Asher White’s 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is a sprawling, shape-shifting record that refuses to sit still. Released on Joyful Noise, the album presents itself as a kind of satirical self-help manual, though the lessons it offers are far more about grappling with chaos than soothing it. From the opening track, “The Sink Thank You,” it’s clear that White is uninterested in polish or predictability. What begins as a fragile arrangement steadily accumulates distortion and dissonance, until the song feels like a room bursting at the seams. That balance of tenderness and turbulence runs throughout the record, setting the stage for an ambitious, often demanding listen.
One of the album’s most striking qualities is its constant movement across genres. White leaps from noise rock intensity to chamber-like delicacy, weaving in touches of folk, jazz, and electronic experimentation. “Beers With My Name on Them” captures her playful side, layering hooks and chaos in a way that feels both silly and strangely poignant. The centerpiece, “Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab,” stretches out over seven minutes of restless energy, collapsing boundaries between noise, theater, and jazz improvisation. Elsewhere, quieter moments like “Falls” and “Voice Memo” strip everything back to reveal how powerful silence and minimalism can be.
Lyrically, the record is elliptical, full of cryptic references to lineage, displacement, relationships, and domestic life. These fragments can feel opaque, yet they deepen the sense that the album is a diary cracked open at random, with some pages scrawled in ink and others barely legible. White’s approach mirrors the emotional reality of catastrophe itself—contradictory, messy, and impossible to contain. While this means the record may challenge listeners who prefer linearity and clarity, the unpredictability is also what gives it so much vitality.
8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is White’s sixteenth full-length project, but her first for Joyful Noise, and it arrives with the confidence of an artist uninterested in compromise. She builds worlds out of contradiction, using abrupt shifts and rough edges as tools of expression rather than flaws to be smoothed out. At times overwhelming, at others achingly intimate, the album feels less like a polished product and more like a living, breathing document of survival and creation. It is a demanding listen, but one that rewards patience with moments of startling beauty and clarity.
In the end, the catastrophe White describes is not just destruction but life itself, lived fully and without pretense. The album stands as one of her most daring and rewarding works to date—a chaotic, messy, and deeply human record that embraces contradiction as its most honest form of expression.
