Cypress Grove – Glaive
The all-too-worn-out tides of modern pop music are finally beginning to shift. As we enter this tellingly impactful decade to come, the heightened sense of change and further adaptation in the world as a whole is extending to nearly every single one of its facets; pop music is just a small part of this immense picture, but an all-encompassing one nonetheless.

That is why the most apparent facets that make up its changing form arе so fascinating to notice and admire — arguably the most inspiring of which bеing its increasingly youthful cast of talents pushing the genre into those aforementioned years to come. But this crop of young acts are not defined by their immaturity and manufactured artistry, in fact, the exact opposite is more so the case.

In taking in this notion, there exists not a single artist more representative of all that these statements entail more than 15-year-old prodigy Glaive. After a stark rise to prominence amongst fellow outstanding talents like Kurtains, Osquinn, and Zootzie in the highly influential Slowsilver03 collective, the North Carolina native has taken the lessons learned from these other acts and has since elevated his career to now-unprecedented levels of pop maturity, intuition, and relevance all the same.

These aspects have been fine-tuned and meticulously crafted since his first splash on the scene in the summer of 2020 to create a sense of artistry that is absolutely unparalleled by nearly any other act like him — now culminating in one cohesive project in his Interscope Records debut in “Cypress Grove.”

Spanning 7 tracks in just under 15 minutes, this project’s brevity essentially serves as an ever-so-slight display of what will eventually shape up to be an endless career for this phenom of modern music. They all reflect the fact that this marvel of a talent is making the type of pop that could only ever be produced in two distinct manners: either through genuine self-imposed nature, or from a completely manufactured source. To say that Glaive himself fully embodies the former rather than the latter would be such an obvious understatement.

The confidence within that claim is simply due to how sincere and of-its-own his music is from all aspects. Glaive has all of the songwriting capabilities of someone who has been in this craft for years upon years; it is the type of emotional maturity and the expert sense of communicating it that is only discovered from years of trial and error in the music world. On “Cypress Grove,” that sentiment is displayed through his tales of teenage angst and genuine confusion of one’s true self and the world around them, just as any other 15-year-old would be feeling at that point in their lives.

Tracks like the previously-released “astrid” and the newly-introduced “dnd” are ideal representations of this keen sense of thematic weight that Glaive lines his lyrics with. Both tracks feature just as much entertaining wordplay and motifs as they do in relatable and captivating stories as well. The same is true for the nostalgia-centric “2009,” though it digs even deeper into his own psyche more than any other track does throughout the project entirely.

This absolutely untapped pop prowess does not end at Glaive’s outstanding writing work alone, it continues its presence quite vividly over the project’s structure and overall sound alike. Noted pop talents like Brakence and Delto among numerous other help to drive this ever-dynamic, yet thematically consistent experience home with their differing production styles and approaches alike. Structurally speaking, the way these styles clash ever so seamlessly in a tracklisting that begins with the solemn “eyesore” and ends with the abrasive “pissed” is not only remarkable on its own, but truly symbolic of the rising state of purposefully genre-less pop methodologies.

From an overall perspective, Glaive has essentially become the first figure to translate that exact essence of nonconformity into a distinctly mainstream channel in a cohesive project. That is not to say however that these songs do not have that traditional pop appeal to them; “touché” is an honest-to-god perfect modern pop song, with each of its facets coming together in the most ideal manners imaginable with all the grace in the world. It is unbelievably catchy, lyrically gripping, and it simultaneously brings with it the sound of music to come in the future with the underlying demeanor of a late-90s sunshine-pop ballad a-la New Radicals.

The lines between tried and true appeal within this genre and the dictation of what is to come for its status is exactly where “Cypress Grove” settles in with such ease. This is a project that could have only existed in a pop-obsessive’s most far-off dreams — something that could only be imagined by an individual blessed with an unfathomable amount of nuance. But that is exactly what Glaive is and was so obviously meant to be: a masterful figure in pop that is looking to carve his own place within a future that has yet to be defined in the slightest. This project is just his latest step in an eternal career to come.