Glaive has been prolific since he first surfaced as a teenager making hyperpop in his North Carolina bedroom, but he hasn't done this before. The 21-year-old, born Ash Gutierrez, has announced a full collaborative album with Kurtains, the Welsh producer who has been one of his closest creative partners since the two were in school together. God Save The Three arrives May 8, and lead single "The Troubles" is out now with a video directed by Lewis Baillie.
"The Troubles" is a deliberate sidestep from the blown-out guitar work and emo-adjacent melodies that defined much of Glaive's solo catalog. The track opens on jittery, garage-inflected drums and soft synth pads before settling into a four-on-the-floor house groove. It's bedroom-pop by origin, dance music by destination, and the combination works better than it probably should. Glaive's vocals float over the beat with the kind of weightless ease that made him a streaming phenomenon at 17, but the production is doing something entirely different underneath.
In a joint statement, the two described how the song came together: "'The Troubles' came together during a recording trip we made to the Cotswolds in sunny England. It's a song that reflects the juxtaposition in our lives, representing the tension between our modest yet lavish tendencies. We needed a dance track, so we made a dance track."
The origin story is charming: Kurtains built the instrumental from garage-inspired drums layered with synth chords, Glaive wrote the hook and his verse, and when the second verse stalled, Kurtains reportedly freestyled over the bassline in a Welsh accent. They kept it. "We laughed, for it felt like magic," they said. That kind of playfulness has always been Glaive's secret weapon; for all the emotional rawness of his solo work, there's a looseness to his best collaborations that suggests he's happiest when the process feels like hanging out with friends.
Kurtains was already a key collaborator on Glaive's most recent solo album, last fall's Y'all, which leaned harder into Appalachian textures and alt-country inflections than anything he'd done before. God Save The Three sounds like it might push in yet another direction; the press materials cite "a wide mix of different genres within the dance music realm" as an influence, which is vague enough to mean almost anything but specific enough to suggest this won't sound like Y'all Part Two.
Glaive is three solo albums deep at 21, and his willingness to pivot is one of the more interesting things about him. He went from glitchy hyperpop (his i/o era) to emo-tinged guitar pop (all dogs go to heaven, old dog new tricks) to Appalachian-influenced alt-rock (Y'all) in the span of four years. A dance album with his producer friend is the next logical illogical step. God Save The Three is out May 8.