Pirouette: 2hollis lets the machine feel something

Pirouette is a love record with the gain up. 2hollis has spent four albums arguing for overloaded, distorted electronics, and on the fifth he aims the whole apparatus at one subject: being 22 and in love, with nothing held back and nothing mixed down. It is his best-sounding record and his least disciplined one.

He is 22 and moving fast. White Tiger and qiyoku arrived in 2022, star in 2025, each release pushing the distortion harder and the hooks further forward. Pirouette is his fifth album and it lands on Interscope, the biggest platform he has had. What changed is the subject. The earlier records kept feeling at arm's length; this one goes straight at it, and for the first time he sounds like a band as much as a producer.

It came out on 11/11: sixteen tracks, 50 minutes. Mk.gee co-wrote and co-produced "Human After All"; Skai, Ginseng and Andrew Aged add production, with Strella, Veil and Concealed also credited. The sessions were dense. Some files reached around 300 tracks, against roughly 50 on star, and he has said he wanted a listener to notice something new every minute, comparing the layering to a Renaissance painting. Ahead of release came a red-walled website and a science fiction mythology of guardians, vampyre lords and a machine that turns living beings into something better.

"Spring (Love Me)" opens on pop-punk: guitars forward, raucous, a chorus built for a room. "Sophie" takes the same idea further. It starts sweet, then twists into something near a power ballad, distorted guitars stacking under a shouted chorus, bright and scuzzy at once. Both are new ground for him.

"Human After All" is the pivot, glitchy and clipped, and the one track where the distortion sounds deliberate. "Hurt" carries industrial texture that returns harder on "Eyes Wide Shut", the creepiest thing here, closer to noise than song. "Heaven Speaker" and "Skin" go the other way: club records, euphoric, the pulse carrying the distortion instead of fighting it. The singles map the range. "Sex" deals in lust and voyeurism, "Warhorse" in force, and "Daisy" had circulated as an unofficial leak since 2024 before it landed here.

His own framing is a narrator called One: sixteen vignettes, no chronology, one emotion per song, love in its beautiful, desperate, destructive and tender forms. It is a scheme that asks the listener to do the sequencing.

It is for the crowd that keeps hyperpop, loud guitars and Mk.gee's own records on the same playlist, and for anyone who wanted the pop-punk revival to arrive with better production. Lady Gaga is an acknowledged influence, with Prince and Daft Punk getting shoutouts. That list sets the ambition: big pop, made by someone who does not trust a clean edge.

Where it goes wrong is order. Sixteen tracks in 50 minutes with no chronology means the switches work against momentum: the pop-punk opening makes a promise the middle declines, and the club run arrives after the industrial stretch and resets the temperature. "Sex" is the thinnest idea on the record, lust and voyeurism stated and then stated again. The density he chased also arrives pre-loaded in places, choruses already full when they start, with nowhere left to push.

That is a 3.5. The range is real and the sequencing lets it down, and the songs that work get the feeling through the distortion without turning anything down. "Sophie" is where the whole idea lands at once, tenderness and volume in the same breath. He built a machine to feel something, and on the good ones it does.

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