2hollis
Pirouette
INTERSCOPE
Grasping the cultural present can be a tricky task in 2026. Musical styles of every genre and era are somehow everywhere all at once. The monoculture is dead in the ground; you can live beneath a comfortable rock in whatever corner of the digital realm you chose. However, amid the jumbled noise, cultural progression continues. New musical styles are still being produced, you just need to cut through the algorithmic chaos. Hip-hop has long been at the vanguard of musical innovation. The last decade has seen the rise of maximalist, internet-derived rap styles like rage, plugg, and digicore, with few recent figures more prominent in this bold new world than 2hollis.
The 24-year-old has already built up a rich discography—five albums, two mixtapes, numerous EPs—that’s broadly trended toward increased accessibility, although his hyperpop influences have been there since day one (that would be his debut tape, which was released just five years ago). Not only is cultural time jumbled up in 2026, time itself feels slippery and sometimes non-existent. On his grandiose latest full-length Pirouette, 2hollis seeks to fully place us in the intense present. These 16 tracks comprise a full-on, speaker-blowing digicore pop album; a distorted, candy-colored reflection of a digi-native’s world replete with dense, fantasy-inspired lore built up around it—one that, this time around, happens to also be deeply, almost feverishly in love.
This level of sincerity helps give Pirouette its ultra-contemporary quality. Irony is for busted Gen-Xers and Millennials, whereas sincerity (of an admittedly complicated kind) is all the rage for Gens Z and Alpha. 2hollis has no qualms with repurposing familiar imagery for his own heartfelt ends, delivering lines like “You make my heart dance like a ballerina” or “I never had a friend like you” with a potent sense of clear-headed feeling. The music he deploys is similarly infused with unbridled joy, such as the hands-in-the-air synth stabs of “Pressure” or the sparkling indietronic beats of brilliant closer “Daisy.” Yet even the most infectiously pop ideas course with abstraction and bold choices. Familiar song structures have been left behind, melodies come and go with willful abandon, beats stop and start like flicking between tabs on a browser.
A thrilling artifact from this era of music, Pirouette is a lot. But perhaps because of 2hollis’ lucid vision, it also feels surprisingly elegant, despite the distorted and hyperactive aesthetic. It captures the oscillating, paradoxical cultural mood of today: maximalist yet intimate, sincere yet abstracted, linear yet deconstructed. The result serves as a beautiful vantage point from which you can view the complicated, emotionally charged present.
