2hollis is a beloved fixture in a no-name music scene. How about a mash of Bladee, Chief Keef, Max Martin, Skrillex and the Geometry dash PC game soundtracks, 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 coordinated wonder whose mind you can't help but move a million miles an hour.
Early releases garnered a fervent online following, his Reddit and Discord sub-channel filled with kids engaged in his personal story, production techniques, and eerie aesthetic, which I can only describe as Roscoe Dash doing the Middle Ages . Its early content, however, has been scrubbed from the Internet. Previous projects and music videos are now live via aliases and alt accounts. Deleted Instagram stories and deleted tweets are archived in fan forums. His official pages include only a fraction of his catalog, the few photos he shares of himself a selection of highly filtered photos. He has done almost no interviews, rarely posts on social media and barely promotes his music. So why, in a niche corner of the internet, are kids calling him the 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. He also co-owns a record label with Skrillex, while his father, John Herndon, was Tortoise's drummer, and releases solo music as A Grape Dope. While Hollis has likely benefited from a life spent around musicians, his work feels more influenced by internet addiction and multimedia fluency. It might be tempting to peg him as just another blond-haired kid uploading repetitive computer music to SoundCloud – an offshoot of whatever we've decided hyperpop meant. But Hollis' last full-length album, boy, it establishes him as a highly distinctive, willing experimenter whose sound never stops or stagnates.
Before his recent turn to industrial dance and electropop, Hollis' music mostly resembled that of the likes of Drain Gang, Yung Lean and Bladee, Swedish accent and all (though Hollis is from Chicago). The rap cloud suited him. The 2022 EP, As within, so without, made with producer kimj, features some of his best songs. Last year when it fell 2, a home electric shock record, the switch at first felt strongly. The album is all chilling and manic bravado: warp-speed crushes and arpeggios, wet columns of bass and vocal angst, screeching 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 interludes in trap and drill. In an age where dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, Hollis' ability to divert and synthesize his scattered 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.
