The Los Angeles rapper-singer-producer 2hollis has amassed a cultish fanbase thanks to heightened everything: Standing well over 6′, with flowing tresses and seraphic features, he’s a Rick Owens muse built like a Bernini. His mercurial dance-trap runs at a breathless pace, and the emotions he croons about are anything but muted. His millions of devotees, most of whom don’t remember a time before pop was rap, treat his finsta deletions and paparazzi photos as sacred texts, charting “lore drops” in hagiographic posts and videos. Surrounded by Starbucks-optimized snooze&b, identity crisis retrofetishism, and everymen inexplicably equipped with orchestras, Hollis is probably America’s only compelling male pop star right now. But how do you continue to top excess?
There’s a whole lot of “more” in the mix on Pirouette, Hollis’ fifth album. The record is longer; the concept, a loosely technofuturist odyssey involving angel numbers and a narrator named One, is complicated enough that even his fans are SparkNotesing it. The Ableton files are larger, some containing over 300 audio tracks. Most of all, the big-tent pop-EDM on his 2025 album star looks downright understated next to Pirouette, which tucks into a bulking diet of laptop twee, pop rock, ambient IDM, trance, even a Mk.gee collab. It’s quite the swing, but hit or miss. The scale of Hollis’ ambitions can sometimes overwhelm the persona that makes him stand out in a sea of aspiring Opium signees, but Pirouette’s strongest cuts give credence to the zealotry. He knows how to incite a frenzy, and that’s paramount in his field.
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Pirouette works best when it builds off the electroclash-happy star, losing the hypergaze guitar layers for something leaner and meaner. “Skin” twists a needling drum-and-bass riff around a refrain Stephenie Meyer wishes she’d thought of: “Only once I’m under your skin will I feel close enough to you.” Tightest wound is “Sex,” which oozes the horndog euphoria of late-aughts electropop boy bands like 3OH!3 and Metro Station. Pulsing low-end opens up into an ebullient gabber sprint, racing under the six-word earworm: “Sex with me, aren’t you curious?” Hollis is no raconteur, but his greatest songs are such sensation bombs it doesn’t matter. By the time he’s swung up into a falsetto to duet himself, the verdict’s in: He makes one hell of a sex idiot rocker.
