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A bedroom in the Appalachians, then Interscope at sixteen

Ash Blue Gutierrez was born on 20 January 2005 in Florida and grew up in Hendersonville, a small town in the North Carolina mountains. He began recording in his bedroom in 2020, while attending high school on a screen during the pandemic, and uploaded his first song to SoundCloud that April. The stage name came from a weapon in Dark Souls III. Asked about the beginning in an i-D interview published on 23 September 2026, he put it flatly: he started making music because there was nothing else to do in Appalachia.

A track called "Sick" reached the manager Dan Awad in the summer of 2020, and the route from there ran through Spotify's Hyperpop playlist to Interscope, which signed him at sixteen and moved him to Los Angeles. The first EP, Cypress Grove, arrived on 19 November 2020 and was recorded in a week. All Dogs Go to Heaven followed in August 2021, the ericdoa collaboration Then I'll Be Happy in October 2021, and a deluxe edition of Old Dog, New Tricks in January 2022.

He headlined North America for the first time in February 2022 and opened European dates on The Kid Laroi's End of the World Tour that June. The major-label album, I Care So Much That I Don't Care at All, came on 14 July 2023 and was supported by a North American run that July and August and a second European tour in November 2023. He addressed coming out as bisexual across that record, most directly on the single "As If", which samples Timothée Chalamet from a 2016 staging of Prodigal Son.

Leaving the deal

The EP A Bit of a Mad One, released on 23 February 2024, was the last thing he put out inside the Interscope arrangement. It ran to roughly a quarter of an hour and pulled his digicore production towards folk and indietronica; listener reviews collected on Album of the Year clustered in the high eighties out of a hundred, and the shift in lyric writing — less collage, more plain self-accounting on tracks such as "living proof (that it hurts)" — is the part most reviewers fixed on.

On 24 June 2024 he announced he had left the label. His own wording on social media was that they had not done him wrong, he simply wanted to own his work permanently. He moved back to North Carolina, disillusioned with Los Angeles, and now lives near his parents; he told i-D he describes himself to neighbours as a graphic designer rather than explain the job and the tattoos. He has also put on benefit shows in Asheville, the nearest city to home and one hit hard enough in recent years to make that a recurring commitment.

Two records made a long way from Los Angeles

May It Never Falter, self-released on 11 October 2024 through his Slowsilver03 imprint, was cut in a fortnight between 3 and 17 April 2024, mostly in Hvalfjarðarsveit in Iceland, with the track "Live & Direct" recorded in Wales. The production credits — Ralph Castelli, John Cunningham, Jeff Hazin, kurtains, Jasper Sheff, user2222 and Gutierrez himself — describe the working method better than any genre tag: a small circle, booked somewhere remote, for a fixed stretch. Vogue put it on its best albums of 2024 list, where Taylor Antrim called it his best work to date and picked out "For God and Country" as one of the year's best songs.

Y'all, released on 26 September 2025 via Broke Records under Slowsilver03, ran 38 minutes and 40 seconds and was recorded over a far longer span, from 7 October 2024 to 24 April 2025, in Big Lake in Alaska, Nicasio in California and Asheville. It is the homecoming record: the subject is leaving the mountains as a teenager and coming back altered, and the sound is maximalist and dance-weighted rather than confessional. "Asheville" preceded it on 18 July 2025, followed by "Appalachia" on 20 August 2025, a distorted trance piece built over a sample of the folk standard "The House-Carpenter". Videos for "We Don't Leave the House", "Nouveau Riche" and "It Is What It Is" came afterwards.

kurtains, the Cotswolds and God Save the Three

kurtains — born 20 December 2003 in Llanelli, Wales — produced much of Y'all, and the two have known each other since they were fourteen. By their own account they had wanted to make a joint record for years, and the thing that triggered it was a song called "Weston Super Mare", written on 4 July 2025, after which they booked an Airbnb in the Cotswolds more or less blind and worked there.

The album was announced on 27 April 2026 and released on 8 May 2026 through Broke Records. Lead single "The Troubles" came with the announcement: kurtains began with garage-leaning drums and soft synth chords, Gutierrez wrote the hook and first verse, and when the second verse stalled kurtains improvised a rap in his own Welsh accent as a joke. That take stayed. The video, directed by Lewis Baillie, was shot on the rocks at Kilkee in Ireland.

Reaction was more divided than for Y'all. On Album of the Year, where the record sits in the mid-seventies on user scoring, the recurring argument is over the structure — roughly half electronic, half rock — with some listeners reading the eclecticism as the point and others calling it a strong EP stretched into an album. Few disputed the energy of the pairing.

Where things stand, November 2026

The God Save the Three tour was confirmed on 12 May 2026, with general tickets going on sale that Friday, 15 May, at 10am local time through his own site. The North American leg ran from 25 September to 28 October 2026 through venues of the Union Transfer and Paradise Rock Club size, with Tiffany Day opening selected dates. kurtains appears on the international run.

Nine European dates remain: Cologne's Die Kantine on 17 November, Hamburg's Bahnhof Pauli on 18 November, Klubben at Fryshuset in Stockholm on 21 November, John Dee in Oslo on 22 November, Lido in Berlin on 24 November, Oczki in Warsaw on 25 November, Circolo Magnolia outside Milan on 27 November, Central Chapelle in Paris on 30 November and Le Botanique in Brussels on 1 December.

He has not waited for the tour to finish before moving on. "Asheghanistan" was released on 30 October 2026, produced by Jeff Hazin, Ralph Castelli and John Cunningham, and on 5 November 2026 he announced it as the first single from Polesden Lacey — 19 songs, due on 22 January 2027, with kurtains among the producers. It will be his fifth album in four years, all but one of them released without a major label behind it.

The set as it is playing now

The current show is brisk and heavily front-loaded with new material. At The Underground in Charlotte on 26 September 2026, doors were at 7pm, he was on at 9.05pm and off at 10.05pm: 25 songs in an hour, opening with "Spinning Around" and ending on "The Band". Four nights later at Paradise Rock Club in Boston, with Tiffany Day opening, the count was 26.

The shape is consistent across the leg. God Save the Three material — "Yaya Touré", "Weston Super Mare", "The Troubles" — sits alongside "Asheville" and "Nouveau Riche" from Y'all and "For God and Country" from May It Never Falter, with two songs released under his Ovine Hall alias, "uk bitches" and "pardon me", played as covers of himself. Unreleased tracks are being tested in public: "Nothing is Real" is a fixture, and "Asheghanistan" was played for the first time anywhere in Boston on 30 September 2026, five weeks before the album that contains it was announced. The ericdoa collaboration "throw it up" has turned up with ericdoa present.