Glaive’s youth lends itself to easy characterizations, but it should really be used to place his second EP, all dogs go to heaven, into context. He’s a 16-year-old high schooler from North Carolina, and his real name is Ash Gutierrez. He’s a member of a generation that has spent their formative years perceiving the world through a screen, and he’s a natural musician.
Cypress grove, his first EP, was an impressive snapshot of modern adolescence: Emotions were suffocating and cell phones were central. Yet Glaive got away with shouting lines like “I’m so pissed, I’m angry as fuck” and titling songs “hey hi hyd” and “dnd” (shorthand for “do not disturb”) due to the force of his charisma rather than his age. All dogs go to heaven follows in a similar direction, but instead of being recorded in Glaive’s childhood bedroom, it’s told from a sleek L.A. studio with a crew of young producers and Gen-Z punk-whisperer Travis Barker. The EP is polished, near spotless, and that’s the problem.
Certain production choices buff out the knicks and fingerprints that make Glaive a magnetic talent. The shinier tracks are solid pop songs, but they’re so amorphous that they could easily accompany any TikTok. On opener “1984,” Glaive dons a Post Malonian tremble-moan that reappears throughout the rest of the EP. “Poison” could be a 2000s boy band B-side with its sultry guitar and Glaive’s drawn-out enunciation (“You’re like a poison that I just can’t esca-ee-ay-ee-ay-ee-ape.”) “I wanna slam my head against the wall” is deceptively chipper, complete with radio-friendly lyrics like “She don’t really like me/She likes alcohol” and “Sometimes I shouldn’t text you/You act just like my ex do.”
Glaive is part of a new wave of artists and listeners exposed to every kind of music across a few streaming platforms. You can listen through a survey of Midwest emo and most of Beyoncé’s discography, but you can also discover 30 songs that all sound vaguely similar, grouped under genres that Spotify more or less engineered. You can even upload your own music and pray your single gets placed into one of these categories. It’s perhaps telling that Glaive is featured on several of Spotify’s branded genre playlists: Hyperpop, Lorem, SALT, Pop Sauce, dear diary, Alternative Beats, and misfits 2.0, to name a few. Glitchy chaos, emo-pop, and future Top 40 hits are smoothed into one mushy MegaGenre, bleeding into one another as their tracklists multiply.
Glaive’s influences are consistent, like if Lil Peep was a suburban teen who listened to pop punk, 100 gecs, and the 1975. They resonate when there’s friction, the styles rattling together inside his brain. The inspiration is lost when they’re coated in gloss. He’s at his most compelling and genuine on the bumping, screeching “Synopsis” and penultimate track “Bastard.” On the latter, he masters the space between a bummed-out scoff and a desperate cry, evoking teenage ambivalence. Initially paired with the clunk of a keyboard, his exasperated whine is joined by a string arrangement as he reaches a moment of clarity. The entire EP has been building to this revelation: “Let me tell a story ’bout a boy I know/He was ’bout 15 years, stood about six-foot four/He made a couple connections and he opened some doors/And now he realized he was way better before.” It would be a nice moment of levity if it weren’t sadly true.
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