Dragons, holograms, deep lore: a guide to 2hollis’s unreleased music

This article was written by Stereogum staff writer, and now the first-ever Chasing Sundays contributor, Danielle Chelosky, who I interviewed on the site last year about her book "Female Loneliness Epidemic." Danielle said she wanted to write a giant deep dive into 2hollis's trove of unofficially released singles, and although I'm not nearly as big a fan of 2hollis as she is, I knew she'd do a killer job.

No other music writer loves, appreciates, and understands the rapper/producer/popstar like Danielle, and her heavily researched piece not only illuminates the dank digital caverns where so much 2hollis lore lurks, but also makes a convincing argument that internet-ordained artists like him are providing a creative alternative to our otherwise dismal online experience. - Eli Enis

By Danielle Chelosky

Here is a controversial truth: An artist’s self-mythology can be as important as the art they create. The anonymity of British electronic musician Burial added to the captivation of his critically acclaimed 2007 masterwork Untrue; the disappearance of Jeff Mangum has only intensified the appreciation for his eccentric, long-dormant band Neutral Milk Hotel. Art is at its most interesting when presented by a mysterious maker with a nebulous origin story akin to an urban legend; elusiveness is the best form of self-promotion. Bladee would not be worshipped the way he is if he wasn’t an enigma, only doing rare interviews to casually recount the time he was struck by lightning. In internet slang, this self-mythology is referred to as “lore.”

By now, it’s a marketing tactic. Taylor Swift has reached levels of hyper-fame by weaving the intrigue of her life into her music, doing so in ingeniously discrete ways, also known as “Easter eggs” planted throughout her discography, in songs and in music videos. You can almost imagine her team coming up with these strategies in a lab. While her fans are often deemed schizophrenic for the extent to which they attempt to decode her messages, it’s human nature to want to solve a mystery. A person sees puzzle pieces and wants to put them together. It’s why she’s a billionaire.

2hollis—born Hollis Parker Frazier-Herndon, son of well-known music publicist Kathryn Frazier and Tortoise drummer John Herndon—is as much of an idea as he is a musician. It’s hard to imagine how popular the 22-year-old’s music would be without his ethereal appearance. Six-foot-four, startlingly slender with abs, and long blond hair that seems to glow—an androgynous angel that flits about onstage with grace. Despite hypermasculine themes in his songs, he leans into feminine looks in a Bowie-inspired way (he sampled Bowie’s 1977 song “Heroes” on last year’s star track “cope”). He’s made it clear with recurring symbolism in his music—the image of a white tiger, the “2” in his name—that lore is the foundation of his creative endeavors. Underlying meanings, which he refuses to explain in interviews, are a core part of his process. There are codes everywhere. 

But there’s lore that’s manufactured, and there’s lore that unfurls on its own. 2hollis is the kind of artist that compulsively churns out music for his own sanity, which sometimes produces the opposite effect. He seemingly struggles to feel satisfied with his output—frequently deleting songs, reuploading them, deleting them again, then repurposing them for future material (“Slow down, ripping on something I wrote a long time ago,” he raps on his new song “Hurt”).

It’s common for artists to resent their previous work and wish to erase it so they can start anew. It’s one of the reasons that being an artist is sometimes unbearable. Art is the act of immortalizing something transient, and perhaps more times than not, its maker doesn’t identify with it after time passes. What we love now we might hate later. We want to exert autonomy over our creations and reject the oft-regurgitated platitude that once we release art into the world it’s no longer ours. We want to carefully curate our work into an impeccable repertoire. But we can’t.

Because of this, there’s a treasure trove of unreleased 2hollis songs. A lot are terrible, the result of an artist hungry to create as much as possible. But some are great.

Coming across an artist’s lore can feel like falling through a trap door into a secret world. Reddit threads are like rabbit holes. The internet is weird; everything is simultaneously out in the open and hidden. 2hollis’ past is permanently etched into forums that aren’t hard to find, yet there’s still an element of magic upon discovering it. Some lore is more well-known than others. Here’s well-known 2hollis lore: When he was only 13, he began releasing music under the moniker drippysoup, inspired by the 2015 song “Drip From My Walk” by Chicago drill rapper Famous Dex.

Currently, he also uploads music to an alternative SoundCloud account named cross, including April’s rage-rap Crashsite EP, which comes through his Engineboye moniker (“Heaven Lich” is a highlight, maybe solely due to its amazing refrain, “Chainmail on my motherfuckin’ dick”). He has also been teasing a project called Pirouette on an alternative Instagram account called @pirouettepirouettepirouette; many believe it’s his next album. Furthermore, there’s even been whispers of a secret producer alias.

Here’s some additional well-known 2hollis lore: While working on his debut album, 2022’s White Tiger (there was an album that came before that, but it was deleted), he experienced a psychotic break and locked himself in his room for ten days. He explained this in a Twitch stream in early 2024: “I believed that I was in the Truman Show… I thought I was in a simulation, and everyone in my life was fake.” Despite often withholding meanings of symbols in his songs, he revealed where the image of the white tiger originated: “Every time I would start to freak out, I would picture a white tiger destroying this dark energy.” For his star tour, a gigantic inflatable white tiger was on the stage behind him.

Then there’s lesser-known 2hollis lore. OSX (Open Swords of Ten) was a music collective in which 2hollis took part before his career took off. The only article about it is a 2022 piece on Subject Magazine, a student-led publication based in Buffalo, and it offers a brief introduction to the group, which by then was named The Tenflower collective. Its core members were 2hollis, Circleain, and Sighsare, and they were pioneering a genre called “chainmail,” which blends trap music with medieval elements. Active from 2020 to 2022, their music was accompanied by a fictional narrative focused on a band of knights in the Middle Ages. Sighsare is a 21-year-old artist named Simon born in Kassel, Germany, and based in Canada; Circleain is a trans artist in Austin, Texas who also makes music as DJ Ca$hface and Count Eain.

One Reddit user put together a cohesive timeline of the story, spanning from 1340 to 1876, correlating the songs with years, countries, and imaginary events involving crusades and cyclops. The songs are littered with imagery of dragons and swords; the 2021 Sighsare collabs “Brothers” and “Tenflower Square” have soundbites of horses neighing.

The story ended with the May 2022 release “The Forest (Final Triumph),” a collab with 2hollis, Circleain, and Sighsare. The following year, 2hollis wiped everything from the shared Tenflower SoundCloud without permission from the other members. Some claimed he even copyright-striked them when they tried to reupload songs. In a 2024 interview with Pigeons and Planes, he said about the group, “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 […] I think that’s definitely a closed chapter but we’ll see, you never know what books can be reopened or rewritten.”

When I first embarked on a journey to hear 2hollis’ unreleased stuff, I was weighed down by a particularly heavy depression and was enticed by the idea of dropping links into an MP3 converter, which I had not done since high school. If you search “2hollis unreleased” on Google, the first result is a SoundCloud playlist made up of 125 songs, curated by an account devoted to unreleased music from artists of all genres. I spent the night clicking play on random tracks and converting what caught my attention. The mechanical process mollified me—pasting a link into the field, downloading the file, and arranging the squares on my desktop into a little kingdom.

I texted my friend Matt about my findings, and ended up explaining that, as most fans know, 2hollis is generally anti-phone and claims to have an app that limits his phone use to ten minutes every day. “That’s wild to me,” Matt replied, “Just cause his sound gives the vibe of someone who lives in cyberspace.” I considered that. I answered, “the internet is never as vivid and trippy as it was when you were on it as a teenager. it’s not that interesting anymore. i feel like his songs capture that, like it feels like being online for the first time.”

That feeling hits its zenith on his second and third albums, 2023’s 2 and 2024’s boy. star plays with more conventional digicore and EDM textures; it feels less like being on online and more like being at the club. White Tiger has a more traditional trap sound, though it also has ethereal synths that can feel like floating through a digital ether. Before White Tiger, there was 2021’s The Jarl (a jarl is a Scandinavian noble ranking immediately below the king, per Merriam-Webster), which was detailed in the Subject Magazine piece.

It was released on December 17, 2021, and 2hollis went back and forth deleting it and reuploading it until finally, this past March, he uploaded it to his official SoundCloud page, where it remains. It’s ten tracks and around thirty minutes. White Tiger and The Jarl are similar, but The Jarl sticks to the storyline of OSX whereas White Tiger has 2hollis taking inspiration from his own life—the white tiger he saw during his psychotic break—instead of from Middle Ages folklore. He was, essentially, getting older and having experiences of his own to orient his music around.

The most obvious influences for his unreleased catalogue are Salem, Playboi Carti, and Bladee. The influence of the Swedish Drain Gang CEO isn’t distinct until you hear a song like “MIST,” a 2022 collab between 2hollis, Circleain, and a mysterious musician named Lechy. 2hollis’ flow sounds like an imitation of Bladee, especially when he drawls, “If you look at me, you see yourself,” maybe alluding to the previous year’s “Hotel Breakfast,” on which Bladee rapped, “When you look at me and hate on me, I’m a mirror.” The rage-rap of Carti also isn’t super apparent until you hear a cut like “The Feeling, The Ego” from The Jarl, which has him spitting adlibs and taking on different exaggerated affectations over booming bass to express the ego taking over.

Above all, 2hollis’ biggest strength is creating an atmosphere, whether he’s making a striking beat or manufacturing a sprawling wave of sound with synths. Famously, he suffuses some of his tracks—“Jeans,” “All 2s,” “Whiplash”—with Minecraft sound effects. Like with the video game, 2hollis’ music is meant to be a world. The listener is supposed to feel like a player moving through different levels as they move through his catalogue, finding secret passageways along the way.

It was the beat of “Jeans,” his 2023 underground hit that catapulted him into virality, that made me a fan. The beat is a bright, immediate blitz; I hear it and see gemstones falling in a coruscating stream, like a prize unlocked in a video game. It’s not enough to say his music feels online. The online of today is aggressively banal and bleak, contaminated with ads and propaganda, operating as just another tool of the evil surveillance state. His music captures the feeling of infinity that the beginning of the internet possessed, when it felt like a portal had opened up into an escapist realm.

Along with having a knack for instantly gratifying songs, he’s also a master of building sonic landscapes that patiently unravel into something big, a talent likely crafted in honor of the highly influential electronic group Salem. The Jarl has a dark, insular feeling, like being trapped in a cellar; yet it also has a contradictory texture of expansion. It’s simultaneously claustrophobic and endless, like a black hole.

One of the first unreleased 2hollis songs I came across was “Looking Down,” which is theorized to be a part of the Pirouette album. It’s a hazy, introspective number that begins with the soft rumble of an engine starting before synths fizzle in, creating a wispy ambiance that samples Whitearmor and Gud’s dreamy 2020 instrumental “Frutta e Verdura.” Like a lot of his songs, it grapples with the perils of fame, the refrain a simple, poetic expression of anxiety: “And now I’m up, I can’t stop looking down.”

Other possible Pirouette tracks include “Warhorse Weekend,” which he performed at Bonnaroo last year and Primavera Sound this past June. It’s the most blown-out song you’ve ever heard, the bass reverberating so hard that it drowns out his words. Meanwhile “God Forgive Me,” a buzzing anthem speckled with explosions and frenetic repetition, is speculated to be on a project called superstar, which started off as a deluxe version of star before he explained in an Instagram Live that it was transforming into something else.

Ridiculously enough, some of the best songs were released when he was only 16 or 17 years old. 2021’s “I Try” is an all-time standout, anchored to an 8-bit beat that has him raising his voice until he’s screaming about having no emotions over Crystal Castles-esque chaos. It’s the kind of unbridled angst that only a kid could conjure. Meanwhile, “Thing 4 U” is a pulsing, suave love song with self-defensive snark and playful voice modulation, and it lasts for only a little over a minute yet has enough charm to be truly memorable.

It was shared through his drippysoup moniker in 2020, and his youth is evident in his endearing straightforwardness: “I’m just sad as fuck / I’m just mad as fuck,” he drawls with palpable frustration. Still, he wields his voice with impressive skill. Equally impressive is another drippysoup number called “At Home,” which revels in contained aggression as he lets his glitchy, disinterested baritone guide the song: “Call me, call me, I’m right by the phone / Leave all your bullshit at home.” 

“Promise U That” has a prelude of beautiful piano from Japanese composer and pianist Joe Hisaishi (who he recently met) that leads into a barebones electro-pop beat over which 2hollis offers one of his smoothest flows, his voice perfectly between singing and rapping in a way that’s ridiculously infectious. It comes from a scrapped 2023 project called QIYOKU, a concept EP about an ancient hologram girlfriend whose existence is summoned through drug use at a club. Sonically and visually, the EP resembles ecco2k’s sprawling 2019 Drain Gang classic E. The idea that connects all the songs is a love for someone who isn’t real. “Perfection was her curse / She was never human / She was always perfect,” an icy voice intones on the track “Goodbye,” which has some of 2hollis’ most feral screams that mutate into sobs. 

But even the medieval-leaning stuff, like the aforementioned “Brothers,” has an insistent catchiness to it. The violin-adorned Sighsare collab opens with a muffled, spoken-word intro over melodramatic violins. Again, 2hollis’ flow has a stilted cadence reminiscent of Bladee. The fictional narrative is at its height here, but it works when he’s delivering clever, weirdly amusing lines like, “Put my brain in a basket,” or, “I hate the air I’m punching / Without my sword I’m nothing.”

2hollis and Sighsare play off of each other like Bladee and Yung Lean, and the chemistry is also clear on other songs like “Realm,” on which they’re entering a realm together, and they both take this shit so seriously that you have no choice but to be swept into their roleplaying. The best OSX cut is probably “It Could Be You,” a distorted-to-hell, paranoid psalm from The Jarl sessions riddled with hallucinations on the battlefield and proclamations of immortality, ending in death.

Maybe only a 22-year-old could accumulate such a large catalogue of songs that mold human feelings into fantasy worlds. It’s evidence that the lore built into his persona is not some marketing tactic, but a way to enhance the discography itself. The self-mythology, though all executed by 2hollis himself, occurred alongside the gradual growth of a young, ambitious, conflicted artist aiming for perfection. Of course, perfection isn’t real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reach for it anyway. 

Gen-Z grew up with the belief that the internet could be the future, that it could operate as an extension of our imagination. But instead it’s morphed into something of the opposite, a weapon that obliterates our attention spans and our abilities to make connections with each other. We could wallow in our disillusionment, or we could continue on our pursuit to make cosmic art, like 2hollis does. If the internet isn’t a portal to another world, we have to create our own.

A playlist of 2hollis's unreleased highlights, as curated by Danielle.