Interview With 2hollis, One of Music's Fastest Rising Enigmas

The world of 2hollis includes so many side aliases, symbols, lore, fanpages, and mysterious images, it resembles a lost society. Hundreds of songs have been deleted; diehards have drawn up mad theories about the 20-year-old’s private life and obsessive timelines of his fictional worlds. A new generation of kids treat 2hollis like the Chosen One, thirsting after his androgynous looks and making “aura” compilations showing him “mogging” Ken Carson after their recent tour together. Throughout his rise, he’s kept closely to himself, never sitting for a profile.

So it’s startling when his face actually appears in Google Meet. Here he is, Hollis Frazier Herndon: no otherworldly sprite but just a guy wearing a black puffer coat and sitting alone in a car somewhere in Los Angeles. He flips the camera around to an empty parking lot, with what looks like the San Gabriel Mountains towering starkly in the back.

“I’m not really trying to be mysterious,” 2hollis tells me, golden hour sunlight streaking through his sand-blond hair. “2hollis is a character, and a character wouldn’t be so forward and 100% out there and readable and relatable. Like, your favorite character from a movie—you wouldn’t see Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle on Instagram being like, ‘Oh yeah, today I’m going to this store, what are y’all doing?’ I like to keep it a little theatrical.” 2hollis was, indeed, a theater kid in school productions when he was younger, but not “a cringe theater kid,” he stresses.

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"I’m not really trying to be mysterious. 2hollis is a character, and a character wouldn’t be so forward and 100% out there and readable and relatable."

In just the last few months, 2hollis shot from niche curio to viral sensation, reaching beyond the existing cult following for his mythical Medieval rap and blistering bionic pop to conquer a larger zoomer fanbase with his new album boy. Then there are his opening sets for Ken Carson’s A Great Chaos tour, which came about unexpectedly. “I was chilling at Nate Sib’s [another 2hollis-coded electro-popper] house, and a good friend of mine called me and said, ‘I’m putting you on the phone with someone,’ and it was Ken,” 2hollis recalls. “I had never talked to Ken before, and he was just like, ‘Yo. You’re coming on tour with me.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay. Bet.’ And he was like ‘Bet, we locked in.’ And he just hung it up.”

Black-clad Opium badboy and hyperpop’s answer to Justin Bieber walk into an arena—it sounds like an exhibition boxing match for Discord addicts. The vibe collision could’ve been disastrous, and initially it fell flat. “Every night, it felt like I was going into an Elden Ring or Dark Souls boss fight,” he explains. “They were booing me offstage for the first good chunk of shows. I’d be in the green room just hearing all those fucking kids out there, roaring and yelling and growling, it sounded like a big entity. It was so scary but so fun.” But soon TikTok was flooded with clips and praise of 2hollis’ sets. Dropping a song like “trauma,” a maelstrom of malfunctioning noise, convulsed crowds like a 9.2 Richter scale earthquake. His music somehow out-raged Ken’s concussive rage rap. “I finally won them over,” 2hollis grins. “Once they all got it, it was insane.”

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On his own, he scans like a regular dude, with an unpretentious, cool Cali demeanor that makes him come across as the kind of aloof but passionate kid who might sit behind you in art class. It's hard to glean how someone behaves from a static camera POV, but this clearly isn’t the same 2hollis who jumpstyle-dances in a haze of flashing lights and strides perfectly upright, shirtless, with a mass of hungry fans in tow. His answers feel refreshingly candid, like he isn’t concerned with myth-making.

In 2020, critics heralded teens like glaive and ericdoa as the future, wunderkinds whose pristine voices would bring hyperpop to the masses. It never quite happened, but maybe 2hollis is the true coming? It’s so easy to do industrial electro-bangers poorly by mashing blaring festival drops with filtered vox. In the past, some of 2hollis’ music wasn’t much more intriguing than that, so shiny and shrieky it smacked like turbocharged Top 40 pop-rap you could file under Abercrombie & Twitch.

But his new album boy leveled up, juddering with EDM overclocked to breaking point. The cheat code for much of 2hollis’ recent output is hardstyle, an ultrafast Euro-blend of gabber and trance. “gold” feels like a fleet of Waymos stampeding over your brain. The album’s most electric moment hits at the end of “crush,” when the windswept ballad climaxes into a torrent of kicks so despicably hard it makes me grimace in awe. He chants the title and then howls a demented scream, his voice ripping apart like he’s fallen into a helicopter blade. 2hollis loves hardstyle, comparing it to “electronic black metal.” “It’s just raw, so primal and euphoric. I love Zyzz. All that euphoric hardstyle gym music is some of the coolest shit ever.”

When I ask for the emotional or anecdotal inspiration behind his songs, 2hollis screws his mouth shut, preferring to keep things amorphous so listeners connect with the music on their own terms. “When I listen to songs that mean a lot to me, in my head, they mean something so personal, and to the artist it probably means something so different,” he explains. As an example, he offers Frank Ocean’s “Self Control,” which is the only song he says can make him truly cry. “I’m listening to the lyrics, and I’m like, well, the lyrics have a fully different meaning. But in my head, that song is something so different. I think that’s what’s unique about music, is you can choose what you want it to be.”

The lyrical vagueness is in some ways connected to his sprawl of accounts and lore, and how 2hollis wants fans to have a choose-your-own-adventure relationship with the music. “I’m into a bit of a scavenger hunt, I think that’s fun. I think it’s special to be into an artist and dig a little deeper and uncover a hidden gem. Maybe it’s just a secret song somewhere or a little page with 100 followers. That kind of stuff makes it feel more personal.”

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Photo by Grant Spanier

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boy is a collection of songs from the last year, and a reflection of growing up a little more: “With that comes ups and downs, and sometimes those downs are the most inspiring moments for me.” The only thing he tries to fully explain, while impressively managing to not really explain it at all, is the story behind the album title. “I called it boy ‘cause I’m a boy. It felt coming of age. I was just like, my life is as a boy, and I’m just… this is me. I don’t know. Just me.”

Despite the caginess about song details, 2hollis is surprisingly forthcoming about his childhood. Born in Chicago, he moved to LA at 9. As a kid, he was obsessed with the Titanic, memorizing facts, collecting books, even building models. “I would dress as a 1900s man as if I was on the Titanic,” he recalls “I would wear a bowler hat and suspenders.” (One can only imagine how hooked he must have been when the OceanGate saga unfolded.) More than any historical event or cultural product, his biggest inspiration was Minecraft, which he’s been playing since the Beta years. “That game’s not even a game… that’s a universe, a life,” he muses. “If there’s one piece of culture or media that’s truly changed me, and I would recommend this to all kids growing up, is to play Minecraft.” He’s still an avid player—he sampled Minecraft effects on multiple boy songs and was playing the game the night before our call. He’s currently running a hardcore survival world that will delete itself if his game-self dies; he hasn’t died in four and a half years. Beyond that, 2hollis says he wasn’t allowed a phone until he was 13 or 14, so he mostly hung outside.

Maybe the biggest source of gossip surrounding 2hollis is his deep industry connections. His mother, Kathryn Frazier, runs the PR company Biz3 (the Weeknd is a client) and co-founded the record label OWSLA with Skrillex. His dad John Herndon drums for the post-rock band Tortoise. It’s easy to guess the access their son must have had; in an OWSLA clip from 2013, a babyface who looks like 2hollis skulks behind Skrillex.

When I ask about his family, he declines to answer—maybe to protect his sacred aura, or because he doesn’t want the industry links to become the dominant narrative around his music, or something else. But he’s open to talk about his relationship with Skrillex, whom some fans theorize taught him production tricks. 2hollis calls him a huge inspiration and says he’s been supportive from the side since day one, but never taught him anything. “I wish. I would probably be so much better,” he smiles.

He’s willing to answer my other knotty questions too. For instance, I asked him about the online firestorm he set off after tweeting “I’m not a rapper,” swiftly followed by another post going back on the declaration. “I was honestly just kind of trolling and didn’t realize how it might explode,” he reflects. “But I am, for sure, a rapper. But I also do not rap, too. That’s really it. I fully didn’t mean any disrespect by that at all. it was a poorly worded tweet, but you know, every artist has a few of those.”

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I also asked him about a recent photo on Instagram that showed him embracing a man, which some speculated was a coming-out post. “I think it is what you make it, you know?” he says, clearly caught off guard. “That’s really all I gotta say. I’m not one thing or another.”

He’s very frank about his musical influences, from deep Detroit house and techno to witch house band SALEM and SoundCloud stars like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. One of the first shows he attended was a Bladee and Yung Lean concert. “Everyone knows, I owe a lot to Drain Gang. Big reason I’m even doing this shit,” he said of their janky Auto-Tuned cloud rap. “Bladee was the first dude I saw who I was like, damn, you can be a rapper as a white boy and it’s not corny.”

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“Everyone knows, I owe a lot to Drain Gang. Big reason I’m even doing this sh*t. Bladee was the first dude I saw who I was like, damn, you can be a rapper as a white boy and it’s not corny.”

2hollis started grinding type beats on Ableton when he was a tween, and made his first song with vocals, an aggro rap cut called “girl scout,” in ninth grade. He thought it was decent enough that he kept making music for fun, until he really fell in love with it.

His gloriously geeky early music includes some of the most rivetingly strange songs he’s made. 2hollis at one point belonged to a collective called OSX, or Open Swords of Ten, that fans dubbed “chainmail” music. The songs blended kinetic rap with baleful synths, medieval aesthetics, and lyrics outlining Lord of the Rings-esque fantasy scenarios. Diehards have made meticulous timelines of events in OSX's imaginary world — from the "Scholar of the Bark" in 1470 to Green Spore Valley in 1610. In “The Battle of Tenflower,” 2hollis raps about "standing up to the king," piercing armor with Bodkin arrows and wielding an Obsidian sword. As his music became sleeker in the last few years and traded lyrics about castles and spirits for vague vignettes about conflicted emotions, some fans have begged for the esoteric 2hollis of yore to return.

2hollis speaks of that time now like a bygone era he looks back on nostalgically. “It was much more of a story, a journey, than it was music, in my head. There was so much lore to that, and it was such a universe that I spent so long in my room writing about and creating.” He said there’s an entire book about the Tenflower universe that he never released. “I think that’s definitely a closed chapter but we’ll see, you never know what books can be reopened or rewritten.”

The fantastical, freaky ethos sometimes slips into his newer output. The Noah Dillon-directed “crush” video shows a woman who looks like a secret spy using a finger gun to explode the heads of men. Trollish impulses litter his tracks: the door knocks on “gold,” the bizarre Chief Keef “Faneto” cameo on White Tiger’s “raise” (“I was like, what can I put here that would be so absurd?”). What’s coolest about 2hollis is the way it feels like he’s Trojan-horsing nerdy effects and anarchic hardstyle energy into songs that would otherwise appeal to your millennial coworker who loves big-tent vocal EDM.

He’s about to embark on leg two of what seems like a never-ending national tour, but he seemed equally excited when talking about potentially doing a video game concert in the future. His fanbase was set ablaze recently after they thought he did a show in Roblox, with so many users joining the server that it crashed. It wasn’t actually him, though—the fan-organizers just made a great facsimile, mirroring his looks and dances.

“So many people were DMing me, being like, ‘Your Roblox show was so fun.’ I’m not saying shit, but I’m like, yo, that’s not me!” he laughed. “Maybe it’s time to officially do it. Although I never played Roblox as a kid. I feel like maybe a Hollis Minecraft show would be more on theme.”

Late in the conversation, I realize I never asked him what the “2” means in his name. But he refuses to divulge. After spilling so much already, he seems to want to keep some morsel of the mystery to himself. “It’s too hard to explain,” he says slowly, thinking. “I like to keep that forever a secret.”

Will there ever be a 3hollis? I ask.

“Shit, who knows. Someday. Maybe.”

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Photo by Dito Andrés

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2Hollis