2hollis: boy Album Review | Pitchfork

2hollis is a beloved fixture in a music scene with no name. What do you call a mash of Bladee, Chief Keef, Max Martin, Skrillex, and the Geometry Dash computer game soundtrack, anyway? The 20-year-old, Los Angeles-based singer, rapper, and producer, whose real name is Hollis Frazier Herndon, makes wildly processed industrial dance pop and rap: His pyrotechnic production is the stuff of a cooped-up prodigy whose mind can’t help but move a million miles an hour.

Early releases garnered a fervent internet following, his sub-Reddit and Discord channel filled with kids obsessing over his personal history, production techniques, and eerie aesthetic, which I can only describe as Roscoe Dash does medieval. His early content, though, has been scrubbed from the internet. Past projects and music videos now live via aliases and alt accounts; scrapped Instagram stories and deleted tweets are archived on fan forums. His official pages include only a sliver of his catalog, the few pictures he shares of himself a selection of highly filtered headshots. He’s hardly done any interviews, rarely posts on social media, and barely promotes his music. So why, on a niche corner of the internet, are kids calling him a messiah?

Hollis didn’t come out of nowhere. His mom, Kathryn Frazier, is the founder of the PR firm Biz 3, whose roster includes the Weeknd, J. Cole, and Daft Punk. She also co-owns a record label with Skrillex, while his dad, John Herndon, was the drummer for Tortoise and releases solo music as A Grape Dope. While Hollis has likely benefited from a life spent around musicians, his work feels most influenced by internet addiction and multimedia fluency. It might be tempting to peg him as just another kid with bleach-blond hair uploading iterative computer music to SoundCloud—an offshoot of whatever it was we decided hyperpop meant. But Hollis’ latest full-length album, boy, establishes him as a remarkably distinctive, eagerly experimental savant whose sound never stalls or stagnates.

Before his recent pivot to industrial dance and electropop, Hollis’ music mostly resembled that of Drain Gang stalwarts Yung Lean and Bladee, Swedish accent and all (although Hollis is from Chicago). Cloud rap suited him; his 2022 EP, As Within, So Without, made with producer kimj, features some of his best songs. Last year, when he dropped 2, an electroclash house record, the switch at first felt stark. The album is all shook-up soda and manic bravado: warp-speed synth leads and arpeggios, wet columns of bass and angsty singing, skittery four-on-the-floor drums and explosive FX. On closer inspection, Hollis’ idiosyncratic take on dance music isn’t all that different from his quirky interpolations of trap and drill. At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, Hollis’ ability to swerve and synthesize his scatter-brained source material into a unique amalgam of genre-blurring music stands out. It’s an exciting development for an artist who may just be scratching the surface of his best work.