Early Years & Origins

In a 2021 interview, Ash revealed that his path toward becoming glaive wasn't quite as sudden as the popular story suggests.

Before starting his solo career, he had already been part of a band, giving him some experience with performing and making music. However, he had never released music independently before glaive. He also described himself as having essentially no audience before the project began.

This adds some nuance to the familiar story of Ash going from an ordinary teenager to recording glaive songs in his bedroom. The bedroom recordings were real, but the desire to perform and some experience making music were already there. What he was missing was less a passion for music and more a community to share it with.

“I got this adrenaline feeling.”

When asked when he first realized he wanted to become a musician, Ash pointed back to a 6th-grade band-class talent show. Performing in front of people gave him an adrenaline rush that stuck with him.

Interestingly, Ash has also said that he had never attended a concert before becoming a touring artist himself.

Before music became his focus, Ash had actually wanted to become a YouTuber. As a kid, he would record unfinished vlogs, sitting in front of the camera and talking about whatever happened to be on his mind.

He also played clarinet in middle school. According to Ash, however, his band director eventually told him to switch to percussion because he wasn't very good at playing the clarinet.

Childhood Music Influences

Ash's earliest musical influences were considerably more conventional than the internet-driven underground scene he would eventually become associated with.

In an early i-D profile, he recalled listening to “Roar” by Katy Perry in his father's old, beat-up Honda.

His childhood music collection was similarly rooted in mainstream pop. Back when buying individual songs through iCloud was still a thing, Ash said that his first-ever music purchase was The Best Damn Thing (Expanded Edition) by Avril Lavigne.

According to The FADER, Ash was born in Florida and spent his first nine years around Sarasota before his family moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina.

He described both places as relatively slow-paced, and said that music wasn't initially a particularly huge part of his life beyond what he heard playing in his mother's car.

Hendersonville was also a starkly different environment from the online communities that would later shape his career. Ash described growing up in a highly religious town with:

“more churches than gas stations.”

The Discord Era

The story of Ash discovering the underground internet music scene isn't quite as simple as “he joined a hyperpop Discord.”

According to The FADER, Ash initially became interested in Discord servers centered around video makers, where he began meeting people from all over the world. Through these communities, he gradually found his way deeper into SoundCloud's underground music scene.

The social network he built online would eventually become one of the most important parts of glaive's early history.

Through these communities, Ash came into contact with artists including ericdoa, aldn, midwxst, and others who would become closely associated with the emerging internet-pop / hyperpop scene.

At one point, Ash remembers having only around 100 followers on SoundCloud. Looking back, he has described the music he was making at the time as “awful.”

Despite that, he was already reaching out to other artists. One of the more telling examples is his memory of sending ericdoa a Discord DM asking him to listen to his music.

That kind of interaction captures an important part of glaive's early development: rather than emerging from an established music industry network, much of his early career was built through Discord messages, SoundCloud uploads, and online friendships.

Sources

• The Line of Best Fit - glaive on the rise
• Notion - Firsts With Glaive
• i-D - Glaive: Hyperpop Scene / All Dogs Go to Heaven
• The FADER - glaive & cypress grove: Gen F