Exotica and the Confining Flux

Recent developments in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) are reviewed on three major topics where nonperturbative gluon excitations of the QCD vacuum and the physical properties of the confining flux play a central role: (1) New lattice results on the spectrum and wave functions of heavy quark-antiquark molecules, known as heavy hybrids, will be discussed. (2) Recent advances on the glueball spectrum in lattice QCD will be presented with some theoretical observations. (3) Progress in our understanding of the nonperturbative internal structure of the confining flux and its excitation spectrum will be reported.