A year ago, 2hollis was nobody. He got the opportunity to open for Opium prince Ken Carson on tour, and the black-clad hellspawn in the crowd initially booed his blenderized bursts of EDM pop. But then everything flipped. Clips of crazed moshpits flashed everywhere, elite co-signs arrived weekly, and 2hollis’ monthly listener count quintupled. Lorde, after calling 2hollis’ music her “true addiction,” had him open the final two Ultrasound World Tour shows of 2025 at the Barclays Center.
“This has been the biggest year of my life, and I’ve learned the most about myself,” 2hollis tells me, sitting in a car somewhere in New York a couple of days after the city’s first snowfall and a day before his first show with Lorde. Hollis grew up on the New Zealander’s music; Pure Heroine was “everywhere when I was a kid.” “She just reached out, showing love,” he says. “I, of course, was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it.’”
It has been an “insane, triumphant” 365 days, he says. Of heartbreak — his childhood home in Altadena burnt down in the Los Angeles fires — and enormous gain. He became a magazine cover darling and toured the world with best friends Nate Sib and rommulas, each of whom make their own Abercrombie & Twitch blends of feverish electronic pop.
Hollis recalls one particularly magical night. A month after his house went up in flames, he was playing at Melbourne’s Laneway Festival when rain started pouring. A mass of people rushed into the tent where he was performing to keep dry; he thinks many didn’t know who he was, but the scene “became absolutely packed, everyone was losing their minds.” After the cathartic set, he and his friends stood there “sobbing in the rain, hugging each other. There was this ambient music playing. It was warm rain, too — you know when it rains in the summer?”
I cry a lot in moments that feel emotional, in a happy way. I was just like, I can’t believe this.
Hollis has been touring with star, an H-bomb of an album built to turn arenas into insane asylums. Early on, he courted a following with Medieval rap and esoteric worldbuilding, but he’s found a real lane backdooring psycho electronic beats into radio-pristine hooks. While star can at times feel like he’s sanded down his quirks, moments like “cope” and “sidekick” cut through thanks to Hollis’s weirdo textures.
Speaking in that very LA sort of quasi-spiritual, blissed-out language, Hollis says he appreciates when “energies” sync up harmoniously. An air of the mystical-poetic seeps into everything he does. He spawns songs from seeing certain visuals (a porcelain Chinese lucky cat, or lightning glinting on someone’s face) and conjures fragments of Easter egg lore across secondary and tertiary social media accounts. The early album white tiger came out of a harrowing period of psychosis, when Hollis said he prayed to archangels to save him and imagined the titular animal vanquishing his demons.
This crosses over into performing, which he describes as a video game “mission.” His pre-show ritual sometimes involves sitting in the dark, imagining himself as a series of fantastical characters. This elaborate roleplaying has gone on since he was a kid growing up in Chicago and then LA, where he got so obsessed with the Titanic that he dressed like a 1900s passenger in suspenders and a bowler hat. In 2023, when he had short hair, he felt “almost like a baseball player… very innocent and endearing… I think that’s why I called the album boy, even. I felt like such a boy in the sense of learning and being very eager.”
On Ken Carson’s tour, Hollis meditated as a “way of coping with the immense fear” he felt, envisioning himself as a character from the uber-difficult game Elden Ring. “It was like a boss fight. I was going into the arena when you cross through that golden fog,” he says. “That was the first time I had the long blonde hair, and it felt very mythical.” Over the course of the star tour, his performance nerves have vanished.
Beyond the music, what has propelled Hollis is Chobani. Just kidding, although there was a big TikTok trend where people pretended that the hook in “jeans” — “Put your body on my jeans” — was actually “Put Chobani on my jeans.” Really, it’s just Hollis himself: the edits and photos of his wispy frame with cascading blonde hair, smoky makeup, and a glaze of sweat in his performance clips. He’s telegenic in a way that feels rare in this era, wherein the thousands of phones recording you inevitably catch you slumped, frowning, dowdy. Not Hollis — every little pout and emote looks smooth.
He’s spoken about wanting to morph the 2hollis character into an “object” to be consumed, a “feminine, androgynous character that’s almost unreal.” But now he backs away from the idea that he’s striving toward an ideal specimen. “I’m not perfect at all. Fuck no,” he tells me. “And I don’t really think about gender. I’m not thinking about beauty or anything like that. I’m just expressing myself in many, many different shades.”
Hollis’ online presence is also just funny, littered with bizarro clips of him asking fans what “diddyblud” means and freeing the nipple for Thanksgiving dinner with his mom. He bursts out laughing when I ask what inspired that sartorial decision. “You fucked with it? Thank you. That’s hard,” he says, explaining that he woke up, opened his closet, and asked God for guidance.
The day we talked, Hollis had just woken up at 3 p.m. after grinding on music until 9 that morning. He says he’s the most inspired he’s ever been, furiously working and losing sleep. “The other day, my homie was like, ‘Dude, you gotta slow down, this is how you burn out.’ But I don’t agree.” He was recently blown away by Joni Mitchell’s delicately raw classic Blue and has become fixated on songwriting. With his next project, he wants to prove to himself that he can tell a story.
There’s a fire within me right now for some reason, and I’m just taking it and running.
About that next project, coming 2026 — after what seems like an internal struggle about how much to divulge, he decides to “just say nothing.” He says it won’t be like loosie “dogs,” maybe his most menacing song to date, with revving motors and kicks like a sumo wrestler bouncing on your eardrums. That was a spur-of-the-moment snapshot that came from Hollis standing in a hallway in Poland, seeing some security guards, and thinking, “it looked genius. I told my guy, like, ‘Start filming.’”
Hollis also says his new album won’t be like the tape Engine Boy he was working on. “It’s not scrapped for life; it’s just maybe put on hold. Or maybe it’s evolving into what I’m working on… This new project is a completely new world. I don’t think people will expect it. I think Engine Boy sounded a bit like stuff I’ve already done. Not that this new stuff is so different that it’s unrecognizable, but it’s a new direction.”
After such a huge 2025, it’s not far-fetched to imagine Hollis doing the same thing again: quintupling his audience. People prophesied that Nettspend would become the Justin Bieber of this generation, but it seems more likely to be 2hollis — if Bieber also self-produced his own madness and grew up on Minecraft and Drain Gang. For 2hollis, beyond the pressures of adapting to sudden fame and living up to his overzealous fanbase, next year is freighted with extra significance. “2026 is about to be an incredible year,” he says, practically beaming through the cameras-off Zoom call. “The year of the horse. I’m gonna be 22 years old. I feel like all the stars are aligning.”
