2HOLLIS AT 22 IS THE MOST INTERESTING BET IN POP

The first time most people heard 2hollis, they didn't know his name. They knew the sound: fat bass frequencies that felt like a subwoofer installed directly behind your sternum, glitchy synths that bent genre like light through a prism, a voice half-singing and half-collapsing. The song was probably "jeans," or "crush," or "trauma." The algorithm served it to them without context. That was the whole point. Now Hollis Parker Frazier-Herndon is 22 years old, signed to Interscope, playing Primavera Sound in Barcelona and Governor's Ball in Queens in the same summer, and telling Rolling Stone he wants to be a better lyricist. The question worth asking is not how he got here. The question is whether "here" is actually where he wants to go. ## He Dropped Out of Music School in 10 Days and Made the Album Anyway The origin story is specific enough to matter. Born January 5, 2004 in Chicago. Father is John Herndon, drummer of post-rock institution Tortoise. Mother is Kathryn Frazier, founder of PR firm Biz 3 and co-founder of Skrillex's label Owsla. He grew up in Los Angeles. He started making music in 2018 under the alias Drippysoup, pivoted to 2hollis in 2020, and wrote some of his most important early songs at music school before dropping out after 10 days. His words on that decision, told to the New York Times: in those 10 days he made "Forfeit," "Poster Boy," and "Plaster," core songs from his 2023 album *2*. Then a friend FaceTimed him from what appeared to be Minecraft creator Notch's house, where 500 people were dancing to his song "Safety." He bought a plane ticket for Friday. The decision was made. That anecdote tells you more about 2hollis than any press release. He is oriented by proof of life, not credentials. ## The Nepo Debate Is Real and Also Mostly Beside the Point "Poster Boy" landed on the EA Sports FC 24 soundtrack in 2023. "FORFEIT" landed on F1 23's. Two video game placements for an unsigned 19-year-old whose mother co-founded a record label and whose father drums for one of Chicago's most revered post-rock bands. The nepotism conversation followed immediately and has never fully left. Here is where it gets complicated. Kathryn Frazier's client list includes The Weeknd, J. Cole, Lil Baby, Skrillex, and Lauryn Hill. That is not a small Rolodex. The industry access is real and undeniable. But the music has to work at a volume that access alone cannot manufacture, and "trauma" convulsing a crowd at a Ken Carson show is not a favor anyone called in. He opened for Carson on the "A Great Chaos" tour in 2024. The crowds were Carson's, not his. He won them anyway. ## 79 on Metacritic Is Not the Whole Story *Star* arrived April 4, 2025 on Interscope, his fourth studio album and first major-label record. Fifteen tracks. Thirty-seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds. A Metacritic score of 79 out of 100 from five critics. NME gave it four out of five stars. Pitchfork gave it a 7.4 and praised its "festival-ready beats." It debuted at number five on Spotify's global charts, the first of his albums to reach that altitude. Finneas, Billie Eilish's brother and one of pop's most credentialed producers, reposted track ten, "nice," with the caption "sick." That is not a small co-sign. But the more interesting critical response came from the fans who had been there since *White Tiger* in 2022. Some called *star* deliberately restrained, a calculated move toward mainstream accessibility after signing with Interscope. There is an active Reddit thread called "The Safe Theory" arguing that 2hollis played it safe on purpose, positioning the album as a Trojan horse for a harder, stranger follow-up. The theory requires a lot of faith. It also cannot be fully dismissed. He told Rolling Stone that production used to be the main point and vocals came second, and that the next project is the opposite. That is a thesis, not a pivot. The production on *star* was co-helmed with Jonah Abraham, one of Playboi Carti's producers. That collaboration is not decorative. It situates 2hollis in a post-Carti lineage of artists using maximalist, confrontational sound design as emotional language, not just aesthetic flex. ## 46 Shows, 3 Continents, and a Next Album Nobody Has Heard Yet The Star Tour is 46 shows across roughly 40 cities. It opened in Japan and South Korea, swept North America, and closes in Europe and the UK. Barcelona's Primavera Sound. Lollapalooza in São Paulo. Festival Estereo Picnic in Bogotá. Lowlands in the Netherlands. All Points East in London. For an artist who was playing 1,000-capacity clubs in Chicago as recently as January 2025, this is a genuinely staggering routing. The live show, by every account, is where 2hollis converts skeptics. Platinum hair extensions, a black stripe painted across the bridge of his nose, Rick Owens on a 6'4" frame. The aesthetic is not accidental. It is closer to a Helmut Lang runway than a rap show, which is precisely the cross-vertical tension that makes him interesting. He looks like a character from a Ridley Scott film and performs like someone who has been waiting their entire life to make a room feel exactly this way. For the next album, he told Rolling Stone he has been reading poetry, watching more films, and studying songwriting outside of music. He wants narrative clarity inside each song. He is 22. The post-Interscope version of 2hollis, the one who knows how a major label machine works and has decided what he actually wants from it, has not made a record yet. That record is the one to watch. ## The Drain Gang Succession Question Nobody Wants to Answer Directly He is not the only person asking this question. The members of Drain Gang, the Swedish collective whose cybergoth, post-internet aesthetic defined the late 2010s underground, are all now in their 30s. Bladee, Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital: the architects of that sound are at the tail end of their commercial prime. 2hollis carries enough of that DNA, glitch as texture, distortion as confession, the androgynous visual language, to be read as a successor. But the comparison has limits. Drain Gang operated from deliberate obscurity, releasing music in formats designed to resist mainstream consumption. 2hollis signed to Interscope at the end of 2024 and debuted at number five on Spotify's global chart four months later. That is not the same posture. The question is whether the commercial infrastructure of a major label can contain an artist whose best work came from outside it, and whether it matters if it can't. His childhood home burned in the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. He told the New York Times that the experience blurred what was real and what mattered. He said he hit rock bottom. He said the last six weeks of his life had changed. All of this was delivered without self-pity, in a joint interview with his father, who was sitting next to him. The next album will either be the most interesting record of 2026 or proof that Interscope smoothed the edges that made him worth watching. My read: he is too stubborn and too aware of his own mythology to let that happen. The poetry he has been reading will show up somewhere. The lyricism he says he has been working on will either justify the restraint of *star* or make it look like exactly the calculated pause it might have been. Either way, the next 12 months decide whether 2hollis becomes a star or becomes something more durable than that.