At Home With Glaive

All Clothing and Accessories (worn throughout) by Celine by Hedi Slimane.

Ash Gutierrez was bored in his bedroom during lockdown, so he taught himself music production. As Glaive, an alias taken from the video game Dark Souls III, he found the nerve to post his own blend of bouncy cyber-pop and SoundCloud rap on SoundCloud itself. A star was born. After landing some recording sessions in L.A., a deal with Interscope Records, and a series of live shows last summer—not to mention amassing a sprawling discography of singles and EPs which quickly won tens of millions of streams—Gutierrez is moving into more emo pastures, bringing bluesy guitar and alternative rock influences into his succinct, infectious songs. For now, though, he’s not moving out of his childhood home in Hendersonville, North Carolina.  So, he invited us over. — JESSE DORRIS

———

“My mom has always been into weird colors. She made the lampshades and the pottery hanging on the ceiling. The living room is very pretty, but just a little unconventional. It’s definitely where I actually live.”

———

“There’s writing all over my walls. I bought, I think, a hundred pack of Sharpies. There are references and lyrics on there for my early songs. Most of it was done last summer. I was making a song a day and just bashing my head into a wall because I was so bored.”

“My bedroom is kind of where my life is at the moment. I have my microphone, I have everything. All my songs are recorded here. I would love to say that my bedroom is soundproofed, but it’s definitely not. It’s dirty. There are fast food bags on the floor.”

“When I first started putting out music I would sit here refreshing social media and freaking out. My mom’s very British. She calls it working myself into a tizzy. I’d get really worked up and it would come to a peak and I’d need to calm down. I’d go lay facedown in a field at night.”

———

“One day I was driving back with my mom from hiking. I was in the passenger seat and I took pictures from outside the car as we were passing by this sign. Most of them were super blurry but there was one where you could clearly see the sign. I loved the pic and I tweeted that I wanna make an album with this as the cover art.”

———

“Jump Off Rock is 20 minutes from my house. It’s a little out of the way, but I go there maybe twice a month. It’s just very beautiful. It’s a bit of a trek, and you have to do a lot of turns because it’s up in the mountains. But if you live here, you know about Jump Off Rock. And I’ve never not lived where I live.”

———

“This tree is in a bamboo forest in the park by my house. It’s the oldest tree in my town and people my age always go there to hang out and sit in its branches. It’s a staple of my town.”

–––

Lampshades by Mom