On January 31st, 2hollis performed a show at Metro in his own hometown, Chicago, Illinois. Metro is about the size of a high school auditorium, and its capacity allowed for around 1,000 attendees. But Metro was the same concert hall venue that presented a fresh R.E.M. in the early 1980s and Chance the Rapper in 2013, before his prime. It’s a legendary launching pad for artists—the Toad’s Place of Chicago, if you will—and a fitting stage for 2hollis.
2hollis currently has just under a million monthly listeners on Spotify, but he’s become one of the hottest artists in the underground music scene. To some, he’s an industry plant— the son of Kathryn Frazier, a music mogul who has worked with the likes of The Weekend, J Cole, Lil Baby, Skrillex, and Lauryn Hill. Yet, to others, he’s the next generation of the Swedish music collective Drain Gang and the cybergoth, tech-grunge aesthetic popularized by Bladee, Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital, and Whitearmor in the late 2010s. The members of Drain Gang are now all in their 30s and the tail-end of their prime. 21-year-old 2hollis seems well-positioned to lead the next wave.
I’ll tell you why. Let’s go back to the concert. 2hollis’ 18-track-long show started with one of his most popular songs,“gold.” Sporting his characteristic shoulder-length blonde hair, black Rick Owens apparel, and a thinly drawn black line stretching eye to eye over his nose, he began to play “gold.” The strobe lights started pulsing to the beat, and 2hollis’ silhouette became visible through a haze of smoke and flashes. The crowd erupted. We couldn’t quite see him at first, but we instantly recognized the track’s engine-like introduction and bass with maxed-out low frequencies. It pounded into our heads as 2hollis’ lyricism and pace blended into the disjointed beat. In the latter half of the song, the bass intensified, morphing from a slower, early Drain-gang-esque track into a hyperpop-EDM-inspired mix. It got people moving. No one at the concert looked like they were standing on steady feet; as soon as “gold” started playing, the crowd became a wave, forcing us all to follow the oscillating movement of the masses.
When 2hollis got to his penultimate song, “jeans,” he performed it like he does at the end of all his concerts: removing the fat bass from the track and letting the melody play out for a few seconds. He chanted “2” faster and faster until it became a constant scream. After a few moments of yelling, the bass kicked finally in, the strobe lights turned on, and the mosh pits collapsed.
These two songs might be the best examples of 2hollis’ “sound”; the half-singing, half-rapping voice with fat, puncturing bass lines, melodies that refuse to be ignored, and glitchy, overlayed audio. Both tracks shift dramatically around their midpoints, transforming into something completely new; just when you start bobbing your head to “jeans,” for example, it disintegrates into an unpredictable soundscape of reverberated screams, glitched audio samples, and tempo shifts.
If he sounds difficult to pin down sonically, it’s because he is. 2hollis uses features of genres like aggressive EDM beats and cloud rap when he pleases. He follows no rules. His artistic identity is simultaneously a pastiche of older styles and recognizably his own. At the concert, that’s why it felt like there was something for everyone between “gold” and “jeans”: hyper-pop love tracks that in another universe were performed by Paramore (“crush” and “cliche”), powerfully slow ballads with relatively minimal production complexity (“promise” and “teenage soldier”), and an unreleased remix of Ye’s 2010 hit “All of the Lights.”
2hollis once said in an interview with New Zealand radio DJ and record producer Zane Lowe, “I just listen to everything, so I want to make everything.” This is what makes him such an entertaining performer to watch live. He taps into certain pre-existing music traditions (like EDM, hyperpop, electronic, electro-house), but he does so with such originality. You can always tell when a 2hollis song is a 2hollis song. He has a unique habit of including sound bites from Minecraft fireworks, he’s perfected the glitchy stutter effect on his vocal distortions, and his voice feels tailor-made for whatever kind of songs he wants to release. He’s somehow sonically identifiable without being reduced to a particular genre, at once everywhere, and still grounded. He refuses to mold himself into anything; everything else seems to mold itself onto him.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
