2hollis Doubles Down on Excess With Fifth Album 'Pirouette'

2hollis released Pirouette, his fifth album, and its Ableton sessions reportedly ballooned to more than 300 audio tracks in a single file. That number tells you most of what you need to know. The Los Angeles rapper-singer-producer has built a cultish fanbase on heightened everything, and this record is his biggest swing yet.

The source review, published ahead of a reader score being logged, frames the stakes plainly: after the big-tent pop-EDM of his 2025 album star, how does an artist built on excess keep topping himself? Hollis's answer is "more."

What's actually on the record?

Pirouette is longer than anything he's done. Its concept — a loosely technofuturist odyssey involving angel numbers and a narrator named One — is complicated enough that even his fans are writing their own summary guides to it. The reviewer notes the scale of the ambitions can sometimes overwhelm the persona that makes Hollis stand out "in a sea of aspiring Opium signees."

The genre list runs wide:

• laptop twee
• pop rock
• ambient IDM (intelligent dance music, the melodic arm of electronic experimentation)
• trance
• a collaboration with Mk.gee

Compared with this sprawl, the reviewer writes, the pop-EDM of star "looks downright understated." The verdict is split: "It's quite the swing, but hit or miss."

Who is 2hollis, and why does the review rate him this highly?

The portrait the review draws is unusually strong for an unsigned verdict. Hollis stands well over six feet tall, with flowing hair and, in the reviewer's phrase, seraphic features — "a Rick Owens muse built like a Bernini." His mercurial dance-trap runs at a breathless pace, and 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.

The review's sharpest claim: surrounded by what it calls Starbucks-optimized snooze music, identity-crisis retrofetishism and everymen inexplicably equipped with orchestras, "Hollis is probably America's only compelling male pop star right now."

Which tracks work?

Pirouette works best, the review argues, when it builds off the electroclash-happy foundation of star and drops the layered hypergaze guitars for something leaner.

"Skin" twists a needling drum-and-bass riff around a refrain the review credits with Stephenie Meyer appeal: "Only once I'm under your skin will I feel close enough to you."

"Sex" is the tightest-wound cut, channeling what the reviewer calls the horndog euphoria of late-aughts electropop boy bands like 3OH!3 and Metro Station. A pulsing low-end opens into an ebullient gabber sprint (gabber: hard, fast Dutch hardcore techno), racing under a six-word hook: "Sex with me, aren't you curious?" By the time Hollis swings into a falsetto to duet with himself, the review delivers its verdict: "He makes one hell of a sex idiot rocker."

What does this change for 2hollis?

The review is blunt about the trade-off. Hollis is, in its estimation, no raconteur — but his greatest songs are "such sensation bombs it doesn't matter." The strongest cuts on Pirouette give credence to his fans' zealotry, and the reviewer's closing standard is a practical one for the field he works in: knowing how to incite a frenzy is paramount.

Whether the maximalist pivot converts beyond the faithful is the open question, and the review leaves it unresolved — the record's ambition sometimes buries the persona that made him worth the fuss. If the strongest tracks win out, Pirouette positions Hollis as the rare male pop star still betting that bigger beats smaller.