2hollis ‘Star’ Review: A Disorienting, at Times Anonymous, Portrait of Stardom

The experience of pop stardom is a paradox that entices even as it ensnares. This duality lies at the heart of 2hollis’s fourth studio album, Star, which unpacks the disorienting spectacle of celebrity, including the desperate pleas for privacy that double as subtle flexes: “Are they looking at me?” the 21-year-old Hollis Frazier-Herndon asks on the confrontational “Tell Me.” He maneuvers through it all with a meticulously curated nonchalance, exuding the air of someone who couldn’t care less when, of course, he very much does.

Call it effortlessly try-hard or try-hard effortlessness—the default state of being for twentysomethings navigating the world as a self-defense mechanism. But Hollis manages to make this brand of performative indifference not just bearable, but at times even exhilarating.

With Star, Hollis continues to refine the contours of his sound, though it still largely manifests as a frothy blend of dance-driven EDM infused with touches of hip-hop. The latter is heard most prominently on “Girl,” where Hollis’s spasmodic flow perfectly complements the track’s fidgety beat and Yeat-esque church bells.

The results are usually never anything less than propulsive. The distorted “Sidekick” serves as one of the more extreme examples of the 2hollis musical spectrum, while the minimalist “Cope”—composed of finger snaps, a simple drum pattern, stray 808 kicks, a few synth lines, and the title repeated ad nauseam—proves that Hollis can still crank out memorable melodies even while toning things down a bit. (He does, though, also rely on a not-so-naturally-integrated interpolation of David Bowie’s “Heroes” to do some of the heavy lifting on “Cope.”)

Last year’s Boy was an exploratory musical playground, ranging from rage to rave music, with enough compositional savvy to help it stick out from the pack. Star, though, aims for the pop charts, and with supercharged tracks that rarely exceed the three-minute mark, delivering hooks like a well-trained artillery strike. There’s a simplicity to them from a songwriting perspective that borders on primitive: Hollis begs a lover to “destroy me” on “Destroy Me,” he tries (and fails) to be “nice” on “Nice,” and he’s got some “nerve” on the nervy “Nerve.”

There’s an undeniable, and perhaps intentional, vapidity at the core of Star. “Everybody I don’t know tryna know me, these days I don’t even know who I am,” Hollis quickly and perhaps too self-consciously muses at one point, more or less laying out the album’s most glaring issue: Four albums into his career, we still know close to nothing about him.