As alternative electronic artist 2hollis moves to add more stops to his first worldwide tour, his most recent album “Star” becomes all the more important to revisit. Despite garnering millions of streams in its first week of release, “Star” was by far his lowest-rated project. On a popular music-based online encyclopedia, named Rate Your Music, “Star” was rated on average a 2.78 out of 5, compared to 3.35 on “White Tiger,” 2hollis’ previously lowest rated album.
“Star” is also 2hollis’ first album to be released with a record label — Interscope Records — a label controlled by UMG, the biggest record company label in the world. Many fans, including myself, wonder how this may have impacted 2hollis’ newest album.
Palo Alto High School junior and long-time 2hollis fan Jack January says that “Star” was less exciting compared to 2hollis’ previous releases, and that the record label it was published with is in large part to blame.
“I think now a lot of the corporate … forces kind of brought him to a situation where he was left to make the album more diluted and more watered down than it would be,” January said.
While 2hollis’ music has been extraordinarily popular in his specific genre, it doesn’t have all that much mass appeal. Experimental electronic music, the genre 2hollis has generally aligned with in the past, has yet to gain significant traction in more mainstream music circles.
Mass appeal, however, is precisely what big record labels need
According to a 2025 study published in Cambridge’s Finances and Society journal, music over the past two centuries has become simplified and less diverse in its composition. They attribute this homogenization to what they call the “financialization” of music — songs being valued as assets to be invested in and traded on by record labels.
As such, labels view artists and their songs as investments. The more palatable the music they release, the safer the asset.
With this in mind, I worry that Interscope, a subsidiary of what may be the pinnacle of corporate interest in music, impacted 2hollis’ album “Star” — perhaps leading to a less experimental and more palatable album.
This is not to say that “Star” has no redeeming qualities. Many songs on the album are undeniably catchy — but sound like they could be from other, more generic artists’ catalogs. The 13th track, “Sidekick,” highlights this problem perfectly. It is the second-most-streamed song from “Star,” but the song has little more than generic one-liners over a simple melody with heavy bass and trap drums. In the first verse of the song, for example, the only real lyric excluding adlibs is “I ain’t never been no f— sidekick, uh / Sidekick, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie Chan, yeah,” a line that borders on nonsensical, often taking me out of the listening experience. It’s not all that distinct from other trending instrumental-based trap songs by artists like Playboi Carti or Ken Carson.
“Sidekick” highlights a general trend of overwhelming lyrical simplicity that leaves much to be desired compared to songs from his previous albums. Lyrically, “Sidekick” is a hype song meant to convey excessive confidence, but within its brief runtime of just 1 minute and 18 seconds, this idea is not elaborated upon. This is in stark contrast to other songs from his 2024 album “Boy” that explore similar concepts of fame with more solid lyrical content, like “Teenage Soldier” or “I Saw It Flash Before Me.”
2hollis has had vast success in his musical career, starting as a 13-year-old SoundCloud rapper using the alias “drippysoup” to becoming one of the most well-known figures in the alternative electronic scene — but he got there because of his creativity and willingness to go outside of the box, not by conforming to it.
Although 2hollis’ newest album didn’t live up to what I and many others expected, 2hollis is still a promising up-and-coming artist who I hope can strike a delicate balance of being able to climb the music industry ladder while still maintaining his unique style and lyrical complexity.
