Has glaive "Fallen Off"?
Note: this was originally written in November 2022, as a writing assignment for my creative nonfiction course. As such, it is horribly out of date, and therefore unpublishable (also, I’m not a music journalist and have no idea how I’d go about publishing this anyway). That being said, it is one of my favourite pieces of writing, and so I’m finally putting it up here just for fun!
If you were to meet glaive today, you might not guess he grew up in a sleepy North Carolina town. He’s thin boned, over six feet tall, and dresses like he’s trying on a type of angst that doesn’t suit him. Over the last two years, he’s constantly shifted his aesthetic. He’s flipped from shorter chestnut brown curls to longer platinum blonde to medium length but unhealthy dyed black hair. He’s gone from wearing colourful and casual clothes to darker tones and high-end leather jackets. He’s always worn jewelry and painted his nails, but the chains have grown thicker, and where there used to be colour, every nail is now black. It seems like glaive wants to appear more grown-up than he is; glaive is still only 17.
Just under three years ago, glaive was mainly known as Ash Gutierrez, a straight-A student from Hendersonville who played videogames with his few close friends. There wasn’t much else to do; it was a quiet place, where anyone mildly different stuck out like a sore thumb, and where it was difficult to exist if you wanted to pursue an unconventional field like design or music. Three years ago, Gutierrez had no musical aspirations; he’d only been a mediocre winds player in middle school band.
All of that changed with the shift to online school the pandemic restrictions brought. A restless kid with too much energy, Gutierrez began making beats, writing lyrics, and recording songs both between and during his online classes. He chose the “glaive” moniker from Dark Souls III, a video game he used to be obsessed with, and started uploading songs on Soundcloud and Spotify. Eventually, he joined a blossoming community of beatmakers and vocalists on Discord, where he met future contemporaries and collaborators midwxst, aldn, ericdoa, and brakence. His brand of sugary glitch-pop emo-trap blew up online, and by the age of fifteen, he had both a deal with major record label Interscope and the critically acclaimed EP Cypress Grove under his belt. Gutierrez had only been a musician for a few months, but the success of songs like “astrid” and “sick” showed that he had clear song writing talent. What’s more, Gutierrez was now famous.
It’s your classic rags-to-fame story, and it’s still ongoing, any flaws in Gutierrez’s seemingly upward trajectory being glossed over by his label’s PR machine. The mainstream music media has been kind to Gutierrez; it hasn’t mentioned the dwindling quality of his music, the controversy he’s attracted by collaborating with a child-fetishizing man twice his age, or his attempts to bring down the community that gave him everything. Not many outlets dare to comment on how he (still) can’t sing live, or on how he’s been losing his artistic direction, not finding it. Rather, these are topics discussed by his oldest fans in Tweets and Reddit threads, some of whom are conflicted about whether to continue supporting him and some of whom have moved on.
It feels like Gutierrez became famous too early; his natural talent is being drowned out by label expectations, and he’s under too much pressure and excitement to take artistic risks or book time off to figure out what he wants and needs. It’s a far cry from how things were at the start of his career. Cypress Grove was a label endorsement of an EP Gutierrez recorded entirely at home, but for his sophomore release All Dogs Go To Heaven, Interscope flew him out to fancy studios in Los Angeles where he worked with the likes of Travis Barker and Nick Mira. Part of the charm of his first record was the way it was slightly rough around the edges, but in many of the new songs, the edges were filed away so cleanly that the lacking vocal technique was left exposed and there was almost nothing else to grip onto.
It’s clear that Gutierrez is much newer to being a musician than his contemporaries. At the release party for All Dogs Go To Heaven, while midwxst and ericdoa performed the vast majority of their sets live, Gutierrez seemed to have trouble keeping the microphone near his mouth and settled for screaming approximately 10% of the lyrics over top of the studio recording, which was being blasted at full volume. Gutierrez had brought energy to the party, hyping up the crowd, jumping up and down, and running around on stage, but it still couldn’t really make up for the fact that he couldn’t be heard most of the time. When he was heard, the sound was an ugly screech of a word that should have been in key. While Gutierrez has improved as a performer somewhat since then, opting to spend at least a portion of his sets trying to sing lyrics, his performances still overwhelmingly look like a guy jumping up and down on stage while screaming to a studio recording. During the joint ericdoa and glaive Then I’ll Be Happy concert in 2021, while ericdoa did his best to actually sing, Gutierrez did not, engaging in antics with the crowd instead. Even now, the most recent video on Gutierrez’s YouTube channel is a “live recording” of him performing a new song. In it, he sits on a stool and sings the first two verses, then kicks the stool over at the chorus and resumes his routine of intermittent screaming on stage.
Perhaps some vocal training could be of use. But then again, Gutierrez is selling out theatres, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Over the last two years, Gutierrez has been using his success in music to convince his parents to ease off on his grades. Last year, he took an extended hiatus from high school to tour full-time. If it’s up to him, that hiatus will be permanent.
In the meantime, Gutierrez’s most recent releases have drifted into the territory of amorphous pop-punk tunes with only a vague semblance of story. He claims that this is the music he wants to be making, that it’s a natural evolution because now he “listen[s] to stuff that has real instruments and real guitars”. But others smell something else: the interference of a label that wants to cash in on the recent 2000s-era emo-pop revival trend. When this culminated in a feature on Machine Gun Kelly’s bonus track “more than life,” Gutierrez celebrated it as a win – but others haven’t been so happy.
On April 6th, 2022, Gutierrez went live with Machine Gun Kelly on Instagram, during which they announced their upcoming collaboration. Screenshots of the livestream began appearing on Twitter, and my timeline that day was flooded with tweets reflecting people’s opinions on the collaboration. Some users obliquely referenced Machine Gun Kelly’s past predatory behaviour. One joked that Gutierrez and Machine Gun Kelly were “gonna be singing abt [sic] the same 16 yr [sic] old white girl,” to which another replied, “MGK prefers them to be 13”. However, a number of members of the original hyperpop community made it known that they were not impressed. quinn (@clubpenquinn on Twitter), an originator of the hyperpop scene who spearheaded some of the collectives that first brought eyes on Gutierrez, subtweeted him in a thread where she said she felt like she and her friends had been used and were getting nothing in return. “Everything we’ve done is being shit on by the niche sound of the industry,” she said. “Thanks to this, our careers probably won’t last very long. Stop being yes men, pls [sic] just try to understand.” To a reply that asked if that meant she was “no longer rocking with glaive,” she answered, “draw your own conclusions, this is how I feel.”
When the song finally came out in June, it was a bland punk-rock track with a synth-filled hook that sounded entirely too polished to be genuine. Interestingly, while Gutierrez was only a featured artist on the track, his part still managed to be the highlight, adding a modicum of personality to the mix. It seems like everyone was aware of this in the recording process as well: when asked about it in an interview, Gutierrez said his verse “was so good that [Machine Gun Kelly] had to change his verse!” The public opinion was split, younger glaive and Machine Gun Kelly fans generally liking the song, while others saw it as the pinnacle of selling out. trndytrndy, a producer tangentially involved in the hyperpop scene, gave a particularly scathing review: “The mgk x glaive song is like if you explained what a hyperpop is to a production team comprised of a bunch of 40yr olds [sic] and then they ended up making the punk pop equivalent of the ‘applebees [sic] on a date night’ song.”
Gutierrez has just wrapped up his “america is a place that exists” tour and is currently gearing up for his next album, reportedly titled i care so much that i don’t care at all; its release date is still to be determined. He has changed all of his screen names across social media to reflect this new title. His Twitter profile has also been updated to reflect his desire to get away from hyperpop, a genre he’s said “he’s working on killing”. It reads, “nostalgic folk pop \ ss03”. What “nostalgic folk pop” refers to is easy: it’s the type of music Gutierrez wants to make these days. But “ss03” is more interesting: it’s a reference to slowsilver03, the hyperpop collective Gutierrez got his start with. Before he ever published a track of his own on SoundCloud, he was featured on tracks such as “clicker” and “crowbars” in late 2019 and early 2020.
Hyperpop was a very collaboratively oriented-scene – by Gutierrez’s own admission, the process typically involved recording on beats sent by his internet friends, then sending the songs back in forth to add additional instrumentals. Most artists were associated with at least one “collective”: a group of artists who shared each other’s solo projects, slipped the same producer tags into their songs, and participated in mega collaborations where multiple artists would sing on the same track. But while Gutierrez’s earliest and most experimental collaborators have fallen into relative obscurity, only a few with similar record deals remaining in the public eye, Gutierrez is determined to make it big in the mainstream. Underneath the darker clothes and the chunkier jewellery, Gutierrez is still an overly excitable teenager. And underneath the new live band and the more commercial releases, Gutierrez is still a musician who came of age on the internet.
Similarly, his audience is caught between two worlds. His newest fans probably have no idea what “ss03” means. According to some older fans, “glaive fell off, sings about gaslighting women and hangs with mgk,” and none of that is actually a good thing. But as with all things, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Gutierrez hadn’t been an artist for very long when he got signed to a label, and it’s likely he’s been too busy touring to come up with a cohesive direction. While he claims he wants to get away from his origins, he’s yet to decide how much of them he truly wants to let go.