2HOLLIS'S PIROUETTE COVER COMES FROM YOSHITAKA AMANO

2HOLLIS'S PIROUETTE COVER COMES FROM YOSHITAKA AMANO

2hollis's new album Pirouette carries cover art from Yoshitaka Amano, who has drawn nearly every mainline Final Fantasy character since 1987. Interscope Records will release the album November 11, and the hand drawn cover is not a hype photo. Amano built his reputation drawing characters for other people's stories, from Gatchaman at Tatsunoko to the Vampire Hunter D novels to Final Fantasy's cast across four decades, and Pirouette pulls him into a pop rollout at this scale for the first time. The label describes the record as 2hollis leaning into a more romantic and expressive side of his artistry, a tonal shift the cover is asked to carry before the songs do.

Amano Said 2hollis Stepped Out of His Paintings

Yoshitaka Amano agreed to draw the Pirouette cover after deciding 2hollis already looked like one of his characters. "There is a delicate, sensitive quality to 2hollis that aligned perfectly with the image I had in mind for the artwork," Amano said in the album announcement, adding that the singer "felt very close to the kind of character I have always drawn, as though he had stepped directly out of one of my paintings."

Amano joined Tatsunoko Production in 1967 at age fifteen, illustrated Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D novels starting in 1983 and did character design on the 1985 film adaptation, then spent years drawing The Guin Saga. His Final Fantasy work began with the original 1987 game, and his logo and box art for the series persisted across spinoffs and crossovers even after Tetsuya Nomura took over as the mainline character designer in the mid 1990s. Amano stayed the name attached to the series' visual identity longer than any single game director. The announcement carried other images too, including a 2hollis portrait shot by Jamie Heath, posted alongside Amano's illustration in the announcement carousel.

Hurt Was Not a Standalone Act One

Hurt was never a standalone drop. It is Pirouette's first advance single, with Sex as the second, and both are already out.

2hollis's earlier release of Hurt arrived in July tagged Act one, timed a month ahead of the Star Tour opener in Tokyo on August 22. The tag read at the time like a rollout device with no stated destination. Pirouette is that destination, landing on Interscope, the same label that released his 2025 album star. Reading Hurt as an album prelude rather than a loose single also reframes the Star Tour dates that followed it, less a victory lap for the first record and more a bridge into the second.

Star Took Nineteen Months To Become Pirouette

Star came out April 4, 2025 as 2hollis's Interscope debut, a fifteen track run produced with Jonah Abraham inside electropop and hyperpop tempos. Pirouette follows nineteen months later. 2hollis self produced White Tiger and Boy independently before Interscope's involvement began with star in April 2025, and Pirouette confirms that arrangement continues into a second era. Star mixed EDM tempos with hyperpop's saturated top end across those fifteen tracks, a pairing that read closer to a festival main stage than the DIY textures on Boy and White Tiger.

Pairing a major release with a fine artist's cover instead of a photoshoot is a bet on range over repetition. Rockstar made a similar bet on scale over range when it split GTA 6's soundtrack across three vinyl tiers built for collectors instead of streamers. Interscope is betting a cover illustration can do the work a feature list usually does, and Amano's name carries its own audience among gamers who may never have streamed a 2hollis song.

2hollis Turns Twenty Two Before Pirouette Ships

2hollis, born Hollis Parker Frazier-Herndon on January 5, 2004, turned twenty two the January before Pirouette ships. Amano was born in 1952, fifty two years earlier, and has spent parts of six decades drawing characters that other performers never got to pick their own artist for.

Pirouette gives 2hollis a credit few acts on Interscope's current roster can claim, an album cover drawn, not photographed, by an artist whose prior stops were novels and a role playing game franchise older than he is. That is the pairing the cover is selling, before a single track plays. If the rollout keeps working, expect other labels chasing hyperpop's next crossover moment to shop illustrators before they shop producers.