Nine Songs: glaive

His youngest years may be behind him, but fleeting adolescence has evolved into musical maturity, a newfound joie de vivre in story and sound. This was not always the case, the lauded merits of glaive's DIY electronic, hyperpop-adjacent projects overlook the internal struggles of a rather atypical teenager by Google Search standards.

When BEST FIT last spoke to Gutierrez in 2021, a string of EPs lay in wait. He mused on reflections of growing pains, frustration with falling into the entertainment business:

“Listening back to my old stuff on SoundCloud, I realise it sucks - the lyrics don’t even matter if the sound isn’t good,” he cringed. Fans of glaive’s early emo rap experiments may beg to differ, erase their existence and there’ll be no i care so much that i don’t care at all or May It Never Falter. Piercing bodies of work projecting maximalist beats and quippy bars into the internet ether, where they now sit comfortably among the most influential of cloud rap uploads.

Today, at 20 years of age, Gutierrez is not afraid to discuss his darkest days, the truth behind the lived experience transfigured into witty lyricism on songs like “astrid” and “touché”. Not least the laments over the loss of his idol Lil Peep.

“I used to be pensive and quiet and really sad, and then I was pensive and loud and really depressed,” he tells me. “I’ve always thought about everything that was happening when I was a kid. I didn't have a way to process all the things that I was thinking, so it overwhelmed me, all the time. I've used this analogy with my friends before, but I feel like sometimes I'm a water bucket, and the water's almost all the way full, and probably from when I was 17 to 19 it was fully overflowing. I was losing it, but now I've got it maintained.”

His third studio album, 2025’s Y’all, was formed by a radical change in the lifestyle of the North Carolina artist. “I have created a more normal life, and it's super awesome, it definitely goes into making music.”

A coming-of-age companion piece to his prior output, where glaive opens his heart to his hometown. “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying”, is a sugar sweet song capturing the terror of falling for someone. Album closer "Bennie & Kay” is a very special ode to the loss of his grandparents in the space of a year. “I think the reason I got better at song writing is because I think a lot, and I read a lot, which helped.”

Referencing a photo of the famous Juventus soccer player Alessandro Del Piero, the cover of Y’all elicits celebration. He shoots, he scores. This winning feeling, of happiness, the embodiment of a new mode of life within the last two years. He is set to play his album with a run of UK tour dates, and one in Utrecht, Netherlands, in February.

“All I really care about is writing really good songs and looking really cool. That's what I'm trying to do in life, it's my mission.” For Gutierrez, what makes music age well is words. Words are what people can attach their feelings to, writing really hard and being genuine certifies longevity.

His Nine Songs selections chart a course of accidental discovery, all vastly different in style and form: female-fronted pop-punk, Michigan rap, and Daniel Bedingfield. “It just hit me one day, it went from radio, straightforward songs with a billion streams on Spotify, to 10 songs on SoundCloud that have, like, Arabic titles.” A self-confessed big radio child, Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” was his favourite kind of radio song, emotional guitar anthems with a little electronic element.

Gutierrez’s parents and closest friends are the glue that holds glaive together, his growth in songwriting can be attributed to their influence in the bridge between child and man. For it is the iPod belonging to Gutierrez’s father that introduced his son to radio pop.

A recent obsession with the British side of his family sprung from the Britpop band recommendations of his mother, who is from the Lake District. On a trip to the Cotswolds with long-time collaborator kurtains, they watched Oasis: Supersonic together.

Upon dissection, his selections share one recurring characteristic that connects the divide - genius song writing. He credits Slaughter Beach, Dog’s indie rock hit “104 Degrees” as the reason behind his love of Haruki Murakami books. Babyface Ray & 42 Dugg’s “Ron Artest” gave new impetus to that winning feeling.

While the cogs are in motion for glaive’s next album, though very much so in its infancy, Gutierrez recognises his evolution. He admits that before Y’all, he could never really put into words his exact feelings, that maybe he just didn't have the emotional intelligence to say exactly what he meant

“Post Y'all, I've made a lot of more fun songs, because I'm having more fun in life. I love ‘Veni Vidi Vici’. There's some bars in that album that I think are so crazy. ‘It Is What It Is’, the verse where I go, “Michelle Yeoh, I couldn't cope, it's all happening at once.”