In conversation with glaive

Sensibly studded, silly, and sincere.

A small town star, sensibly studded, silly, and sincere. Few encapsulate emotional turmoil and friction like the thrashing crystallised beats of American electronic musician glaive. glaive’s music is bold, unabashed, but notably full of heart. Growing up in the spotlight of indie music journalists and fans alike, glaive has been putting out music since he was 15, initially causing a stir with his genreless teenage angst-afflicted melodies. Dropping his third album on September 26th, Y’all finds glaive back home where it all started, reflecting on his hometown and emotions with a newfound vulnerability.

Hi! How are you? And where are you calling from?
Hey, this is my bedroom. I’m in Asheville, North Carolina, where I live. And I’m doing great. I woke up at like…five hours ago. My brain’s kind of fried, but I’m feeling good. Happy to be home.

That was actually part of my first question:  I read that you moved back to your hometown, Asheville. How has that been?
It’s great. I mean, I’m technically from a place called Hendersonville. This is all North Carolina semantics, but I’m like a 30-minute drive from Asheville, and it’s basically my home. But yeah, I mean, I love it here. I feel like I haven’t been here much recently, except for just travelling and going to places. It’s a bit boring, but it’s nice to be home. The weather’s really nice right now. I’m having lunch with my parents in a few hours. So it’s cool. It’s chill. I was just making music in this place called the Cotswolds, which is in the middle of the UK. And it was really stimulating. And I was like, they’re making music all day and like fucking doing this. And I’m just home. I live alone. So there are no people. And it’s kind of a weird juxtaposition between like, what I was doing and what I’m doing right now. But, I don’t know, it’s fun, it’s nice. That’s the reason I moved here, because it’s very calm. Nothing happens.

Asheville is a pretty rural area town right?
I mean, Asheville by North Carolina standards is like the third biggest city in North Carolina, I think, but probably by the city slicker standard, it’s pretty small. Where I’m from, Hendersonville is like fuck in the middle of nowhere There aren’t many people.  My graduating class was like, I don’t know for context, it was like 60 people, maybe? 50 people? Yeah. So it’s definitely small.

I can imagine that’s probably like suffocating at some point.
Yeah. So small. When I was growing up, it was so fucking grating. So I started making music when I was like 15. And I just like, I had all these friends and they were all like doing this crazy shit and being in these cities. I thought it was so cool. And like being in this small town where everybody’s pretty behind on whatever’s going on. I just felt very out of place. But now I go back and I feel like I’m at home, so I don’t know my perspective definitely changed a lot. But, definitely at one point, it was like I genuinely felt like I was born in hell. “Why am I here? Where am I?”. 

So you’re building up towards your new album, Y’all. How are you feeling about putting out music again?
I mean, it’s exciting. It’s always nice to talk to people about music because it’s kind of like what all my friends and I talk about through music. So it’s kind of like fucking annoying to just talk about it all the time, but then it’s like, I’m finally putting music out and I’m talking to people.  It’s exciting. It’s nerve-wracking. I’m always really nervous. My album comes out in 17 days. I’m announcing the cover art and the track list today. I’m hoping people are going to see my vision. But I don’t know.  It’s kind of everything you would imagine. It’s probably how you imagine, like, if you’re, like, giving birth or something. I’ve never given birth, nor do I have siblings, so I don’t know how it goes. But, like, I’m high, and I’m kind of like, “What if they don’t fuck with him?”.

Right, you’re giving a child to the world, in a way.
Yeah, exactly. Which sounds very egotistical. It’s not like I’m thinking about it like actually a child. It’s the same feelings that I imagine you feel when you’re about to drop a child.

In a similar vein, you started music when you were a child, properly at 15, at the beginning of COVID.  I was also 15 then, and I remember that was the moment when hyperpop really started to amp up online. Reflecting on that,  what do you notice has changed in the past six years in that scene?
I mean, so many people have done quite well out of it, which is awesome. But at one point, I thought it was really stupid. I was like, all these older, well, in my 15-year-old mind, like a 24-year-old person was like this old fucking thing. Like dinosaur person, like telling me like my music was like hyperpop. I still don’t necessarily understand what it means, like I’ve never had somebody give me a very succinct answer on what makes a song hyperpop. I’m happy that, like so many of the kids that I used to be friends with, they’re getting out of this. A  lot of kids at one point were just like hyperpop people right now. They’re like creating their own life for themselves, creating music completely away from this “hyperpop thing”, and it’s like this whole different thing. Which I think is really cool and fun. But yeah, I don’t think about it much. 

Talking about the promotional images, Y’all, it has a lot to do with football or soccer imagery in it.  Can you speak on why you made this choice as your visual language for this new project? What does that represent to you in your work?
Yeah, I got really deep on this game called Football Manager. It’s a statistic-intensive soccer management game. So that got me into soccer. Then I started looking at real games and got really interested in that.  I was really drawn into the, for lack of a better term, emotionality of it all. There’s quite a lot of interesting parallels between art and sport and my family. So I’ve grown up around sports, not soccer, but my dad played polo. I just thought it was so interesting that, like sports, especially soccer, is just a bunch of really emotional guys. They’re just like, crying, fucking super upset about like shit happening. Like it’s really intense. And when you think of sporting, sporting men, at least in my mind, even just from my father and my grandfather and stuff, like they’re not very emotional. But to see all these younger, soccer players just be super fucking emotional. Like losing their shit, crying, like having like these intense moments of like joy and despair and agony and all of these things, just wrapped like this one kind of, I guess, canvas for like this field is just kind of housing all these emotions at one time. And I thought it was really interesting. And I think a lot of the soccer players like to dress really cool and look really cool. So it kind of was a culmination of understanding the emotionality and just being like lit. They look lit, yeah. 

 Like you said, it’s like a very emotional practice, right? It’s like the entire range of emotions in one activity. Was this emotionality a kind of parallel for you in this new project?
I definitely think my music’s always been very emotional. But I think this album is the best way I’ve been able to put my emotions, or at least the most honest. I normally spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m saying, and I do spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m saying on this album. But I’m kind of just saying it how it is, as opposed to like trying to like fucking create some interesting metaphor or anything. I’m just like, “This is how I feel and this is what it is.”. And I think that is what I saw in sports as well.  There’s no hiding the way you feel on your face. Which in music you can really do. It’s recorded months in advance. It’s not happening live. I thought that it was really cool to watch these guys experience this stuff live and really go through these emotions. They’re in front of tens of thousands of people, and then behind a camera, they’re in front of millions of people. I just thought it was super interesting. I just related to being an emotional guy, which is forgetting they’re emotional guys,  I fucking I fuck with them. And their outfits are super fire. That’s just what I’m trying to do, be an emotional guy and try to put on a good outfit.

Real, aren’t we all. Hate the player or hate the game?
I’ve always just thought of it in like a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” kind of situation. But now that I’m thinking about it, and this is all completely off the cuff, I think that you gotta hate the player. This is such a fucking meta conversation, but the game is responsible for the actions of the player, but you have to blame people’s actions, my actions, your actions, whatever.  While they are influenced by the world and the government or whatever, the actions are still your own. So I guess you do have to hate the game. You can hate the game. I think everyone should hate the game. But to hate the game, you must understand that without the players, the game doesn’t exist.

 Other than football or soccer, was there any other non-musical inspiration behind this album?
Oh, what could this be? I really was watching a lot of soccer interviews. I know it’s not really supposed to be sport-related. There’s this guy named Jose Mourinho. You should watch one of his interviews. He’s fucking insane. He’s a Portuguese soccer manager.  He has this interview where he’s like sitting down with the British press for soccer, and he’s like, “I’m special. I’m the special one.” He’s sort of like a kind of strange complex, but I really want it to be like that.  I don’t wanna be an asshole, but he is very himself and kind of not apologising for who he was. And I always thought that was very admirable. A lot of the soccer players are like that. Like you have this kind of interesting complex between being like this masculine man with an ego, but then also having to understand, like loss. I found it really interesting, I think that like they’re sort of egotistical demeanour mixed with this kind of scared boy in my heart is something that I really relate to.

How are these “scared boy” emotions coming through sonically on this next album?
I think a lot of the songs are very not Scared Boy.  There are a lot fewer moments on it where I feel like I’m being super vulnerable. Some people might not agree with me. But it does feel like some of the songs I’m like playing it up, but there’s always this underlying sort of feeling of vulnerability, I suppose. A lot of the songs are really loud and electronic because that’s kind of how it feels to be a masculine man. Obviously, a masculine man doesn’t fucking make electronic dance music, but like, that’s how it felt to me. There are moments where I feel like it’s very scary vibes,  but for the most part, sonically, I was trying to match the bravado that I was trying to give off. And in the moments where it is really vulnerable, it’s meant to sort of match the feeling. 

I noticed in the recent singles that you use samples of American Appalachian folk songs in them. What drew you to these samples?
I did a show in Asheville in late April.  And I found this CD. By this lady named Almeda Riddle, who’s the sample on Appalachia. She’s the G.O.A.T.  There’s no beat. She never sings on beat. It’s always just acappella. It’s really interesting.  I was like, back home in North Carolina, and I don’t feel like there’s that much art that has come out of North Carolina that is interesting. Like, there’s J. Cole. But there’s not much music that I’m making that I feel a personal attachment to, that is from the place that I’m from. I don’t think there’s any music really from where I’m from, like in the mountains up here. Other than this, Appalachian folk music.  In the Appalachian region, the music is a kind of blues infused with banjo stuff, like these weird yodelling voices, and I was just blown away. I really want somebody in North Carolina to interpolate this Appalachian music because it’s so interesting, and I do feel like both socioeconomically and artistically, the Appalachian mountains are a very underrepresented part of America. I was waiting for so long. I remember I had a conversation with a tattoo artist, and I was like, “We’re both from North Carolina, somebody’s gotta fucking do something. I just gotta fucking do it. I’m the only one that’s gonna do it.”.  And I hope somebody will do it more than I and do it more amazingly than I. I like fucking Appalachian folk music. I think it’s awesome. I’d like, hopefully, somebody who listens to my song is like, “Whoa, this song is fire.”. 

You also sampled an army chant, right?  
Yeah, we were in Alaska when I heard it, and it just described perfectly my situation. I left my home, and my mama cried, and I was like, I completely relate to all this. I don’t listen to army music, but when I heard that, I was like, we gotta do this. It exemplifies what I’m feeling. Leaving home and then being kind of like, fuck, this is trash. I’m not in the army, but I’d imagine that’s how it feels. It’s like, fuck. I gotta go home. 

Beautiful. Where should people listen to the new album? What setting or emotion fits this music?
I think the ideal situation is if everybody could do it, I’d have them come listen to it in my car. Because in my car, it sounds so good. Because it really was mixed to be played in my car. That’s obviously not feasible. But like the second ideal situation is listening to it in like some nature vibes, which doesn’t really make sense for the music. This isn’t about the sound of the music. The sound of the music you can listen to, like probably in your house or on speakers, makes the most sense. But if I could picture a beautiful girl in a white dress listening to this music on a hike. Yeah. That’s the ideal. That’s the top. I’m not expecting people to do that.  That’s probably not even the best place to listen to it. Like, the best place is probably listening to it on AirPods while you vape. But like, in my perfect world, everybody would either be in my car or on a hike. Yeah. But I don’t think many of the people who listen to it have a car or…

…go outside?
Yeah, that too. 

I’ve noticed there’s a lot of emerging electronic artists coming from rural America, like you, Frost Children, Midwxst, and Jane Remover. Do you have any thoughts about why we’re seeing a wave of artists from very rural areas create this kind of emotionally charged electronic music?
There’s nothing better to do. There’s literally nothing better to do. I’m sure this speaks to anybody from a small town; you feel a lot of things. You probably feel more things than people that live in a big city because you’re not distracted by anything. All you have is time.  That’s why a lot of people in my hometown at least smoke weed all day and just lose their fucking minds because they’re so bored.  I think that a lot of this, like really intensely stimulating and intensely emotionally charged music, comes from a lack of stimulation in life. If you’re from a city, I think the environment is often stimulating enough. I do not need to be fucking making music that’s making my brain explode. But when you’re in the middle of nowhere and all your friends are just like, “Dude, this is terrible.”.  You’re just like, I need something that’s going to scratch the itch of being alive or make you feel something. And I think that leads to a bunch of kids just being super online, which is how I met a lot of those people, and making very electronic and loud, just intense, stimulating music and being very emotional whilst doing it. That’s my synopsis. That is how it is for me, but for other people, it could have been because they were just like, I don’t know, doing something else, like at a Cracker Barrel or something.