2hollis’ tenacity is finally paying off

Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

The 2hollis stans on Discord have been swearing that he’s the new Playboi Carti, an angel sent down from Rick Owens heaven. But during his first shows opening for rage rap star Ken Carson on this year’s Chaos tour, the musician quickly realised that he still needs to earn his stripes.

​“I got booed off stage a bunch of times at the beginning of that tour,” the 20-year-old admits over Zoom. The singer, rapper and producer is resting up at his Los Angeles home a few months after the Chaos tour and a few days after completing his first as a headliner. ​“But I was just like: ​‘You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to keep pushing it, because they’re going to get it.’ And it worked. It was crazy. It ended up being so, so insane.”Rage rap fans are a notoriously tough crowd – Rico Nasty also got booed when she toured with Carti, Ken Carson’s Opium label boss – but by the end of the Ken tour, 2hollis’s opening slot inspired moshpits resembling a Bosch painting: a bunch of damned kids throttling against each other like they were desperately clambering out of hell, and his security had to deal with the kids mobbing his Sprinter van every night after the show.

This year, the LA-via-Chicago artist born Hollis Frazier-Herndon has burst out of the underground with caustic, compulsive and self-produced music that sounds like a mix of Crystal Castles, Drain Gang, Justin Bieber, EDM, rage and a pipe bomb. As heard in the ungovernable energy of jeans, the frenetic chaos of trauma, the stamping synths of crush, it’s the kind of thing that would kill a Victorian child, or maybe even a kid in 2018 who had yet to hear Whole Lotta Red. Thanks to 2hollis’s gift for infectious emo melodies and his poster-boy looks, he also has real pop star potential.

At the time of writing, there has only been one interview published with Hollis. In conversation, he’s much more open than his shadowy persona would suggest, even if he is so groggy from a post-tour illness that he’s sworn off the American Spirits. ​“Don’t smoke, kids,” he warns. ​“Smoking isn’t dope. I don’t think it’s cool.” He still radiates elfin otherworldliness, with platinum blonde hair extensions that reach down to the top of his ribcage, a look which he had as a fantasy-loving child. ​“I’m returning to my old self in a beautiful way,” he says. ​“This is the true Hollis”.

Growing up in Mid-City Chicago, his school didn’t have a playground, so when Hollis was nine, he created his own games and kept a record of their complex lores in a red leather notebook. One invention that took his classmates by storm was Keepers, a role-playing game filled with fantastical realms and factions that turned the concrete non-playground into an epic fantasy megaverse. And this blue-sky-thinking pre-teen didn’t just invent games but public holidays, too. Here’s one to mark in your calendars: Mewhaha Day, which falls in December, exactly two weeks after Thanksgiving. That’s a time when a dragon named Mewhaha transcends his dimension to visit us and leave kindly tidings. Hollis created it as a ploy to receive a pocket watch from his parents before Christmas. ​“I was like: ​‘I’m just gonna create my own holiday and preorder that shit.’”

In elementary and middle school, Hollis was a ​“bad kid” and ​“class clown”, suspended and expelled twice for, among other infractions, starting a fist fight with a pupil who insulted his mother. Cue bad grades in high school and, eventually, his dropping out of college after a week. His imagination, though, saved the day. ​“Worldbuilding and lore have always been a part of me,” he says. ​“And I feel like music is the perfect medium to express it.”

His dad John Herndon, a producer and drummer who was a member of cult Chicago post-rock band Tortoise, had gifted him Ableton software for his 11^th birthday and the adolescent Hollis developed a passion for making beats. He devoured info on Ableton Reddit forums, Discord servers and YouTube tutorials, which he still watches to this day.

Hollis speaks warmly of his mum a number of times during our conversation. He’s also eager to address the ​“nepo baby shit” – that is, the snark that his path into music has been smoothed because of his dad’s background and his mum’s profession as a high profile publicist and artist manager. ​“She’s never represented me. She’s never done publicity for me. She’s never planted me in meetings with anyone or put me in sessions…What matters the most to me is building [this] myself.”

And without question, he’s been building it for almost a third of his life. In 2018, 14-year-old Hollis emerged under the alias Drippysoup, rocking a look resembling the early 2010s jerk subculture with a black backwards cap, belted light pants and a mop of dirty blonde hair. The kids at high school made fun of his Bieber-meets-Chief Keef look and a sound which mashed glitchcore with Chicago drill. ​“Fools didn’t get it,” he says.

Then during the pandemic, a time when the word ​“aesthetic” transitioned from an adjective to a noun, Hollis drastically rebranded with a medieval-inspired style. He spammed Discord with his knightcore sound, taking the kids back to 1490 with his bardcore trap and soon gaining a small but vociferous following across underground rap servers. Even when he hid behind the serf gimmickry, Hollis’s stinging vision, taut musical control and neuron-activating impulses stood out.Then, once he’d taken off the armour, it was impossible not to take stock of his well-honed experimentalism. His ability to stretch rap into putty was particularly evident on 2022’s album White Tiger, a step that edged him closer to the tastefully rattlebrained EDM he’s making now.

After years of grinding as an independent artist and dropping his third album boy this summer, Hollis joined Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and Blackpink on the Interscope roster. The deal was marked by the explosive, euphoric gold. Co-produced by Carti and Carson collaborator Jonah Abraham, it’s one of his most streamed songs to date.

It’s been a whirlwind since Hollis first stepped onstage for the Chaos tour. But despite the immense pressure that comes for any artist who blows up so suddenly, he insists that he’s ready for it all. ​“I want to be the biggest thing in the world,” he declares. ​“So I’m not afraid of that.”

MAKE-UP Claire Brooke PRODUCER Katherine Bampton PHOTO ASSISTANT Pedro Salcido STYLING ASSISTANT Daemonte Phillips MAKE-UP ASSISTANT Grace Kim