Chasing Fridays: 2hollis, Jane Remover, Turnstile, more

This is one of the longest Chasing Fridays columns in a while – and for good reason. This week, Chasing Sundays surpassed 1500 subscribers, which is a number that I totally couldn't imagine achieving when I launched this blog a couple years ago. I'm insanely grateful that that many of you care about what I have to say about shoegaze, hardcore, rap, indie, etc. So, in a display of my gratitude, I put extra effort into this week's column, going deep on two of my most anticipated records of 2025, weighing in heavily on a certain hardcore band's return, recommending a cool underground gem, and then revisiting an album that meant the world to me in high-school.

As always, that final portion of Chasing Fridays, in which I go in on an older record I've been spending time with, is for paying subscribers only, so you can toss me $5/month to read that and any other paywalled content on my site. Thanks to everyone who supports me monetarily, as I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time as I do to this site without your generosity.

2hollis's star and Jane Remover's Revengeseekerz offer complementary glimpses at pop's future

Since we're now living through the middle of the decade, I've been thinking a lot about the nascent distinctions between early-2020s music and mid-2020s music. To me, the most emblematic sound of the beginning of this decade is hyperpop. In 2035, songs from the 1000 gecs remix album, food house's debut, and Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now will sound as dated to that specific epoch as stomp-clap folk does to the early 2010s and synth-pop does to the early 80s. As for the period of the 2020s that we're currently enduring, I can't think of many artists who feel more 2025 than 2hollis and Jane Remover.

Both 21-year-old singer-producers dropped new albums last Friday that navigate the cross-section of pop, rap, EDM, and emo. Both records, 2hollis's star and Jane Remover's Revengeseekerz, grapple with coming of age into stardom; trying to manage all the messiness of being a young person (sex and love, mostly) while also enduring the pressures of a budding career in music. Both albums have incited intense reactions from their respective fanbases. And both records are being relentlessly compared to one another for reasons that range from valid (all the aforementioned symmetry) to reductive (all the forthcoming unpacking). I've decided to write about both records at once because the similarities and differences between the two say a lot about 2hollis and Jane Remover as individual artists, and also about the larger internet music milieu that they exist within.

I suppose 2hollis and Jane Remover could both be described as "post-hyperpop," in the sense that they're both contorting the bubblegum maximalism of hyperpop into darker, more introspective forms of genre-fluid electro-pop – a hyperkinetic pop that's more emotionally clattering than it is playfully explosive. Following Playboi Carti's rage-rap capstone, MUSIC, and Charli XCX's hyperpop mic drop, Brat, rap and pop are simultaneously due to transition out of the styles that defined the previous half-decade. With star and Revengeseekerz, 2hollis and Jane Remover offer complementary visions for what the next five years might sound like. The genre lines they're mutually crossing – pop, rap, EDM – are somehow even blurrier than their hyperpop predecessors, but with both of these albums, the final product feels more focused and exacting than the gleeful randomness typified by 100 gecs. Meanwhile, the beats and rap flows, even at their most aggressive, feel more epic and rave-ready than all the hostile mosh rap that's emerged in the image of Carti's Whole Lotta Red.

2hollis and Jane Remover didn't come up in the same SoundCloud scenes, and as recently as two years ago, they were making very different kinds of music. The assaultive beats and jittering rap flows of Revengeseekerz aren't entirely new territory for Jane Remover, who pioneered hyperpop's edgier, rap-rooted sibling genre digicore in the early 2020s. However, Revengeseekerz is a massive swerve away from the earthy post-rock of 2023's Census Designated, a shaggy, guitar-addled statement piece – at times overindulgent, at others brilliant – that seemed to suggest Jane Remover was fully uncoupling from the overblown pop-rap bangers they cut their teeth making. For 2hollis, star isn't nearly as dramatic of a leap. On all four of his albums, he's been affixing big-room EDM drops and sticky alt-pop hooks to rap's du jour styles – shrieky cloud-rap for 2022's White Tiger, Opium-indebted rage-rap for 2024's boy, jerky swag-rap on 2025's so-bad-it's-almost-good loosie, "Style." star is less an evolution than it is a refinement of his sound.

For all the ways in which star and Revengeseekerz converge around similar ideas, their differences are also quite glaring: 2hollis is the ready-made popstar, and Jane Remover is the weirdo auteur. While star finds 2hollis expressing some reservations with impending celebrityhood ("tell me" catalogs his tendency to name-search, his fear of doing press, and his paranoia of being recognized in public), the bulk of the record sounds like a conscious effort to stop and smell the flowers on his lightning-speed ascent to fame – a concept he personifies with literal racecar noises during the album's spoken-word interludes, which sound cinematic the first time through and increasingly like scripted cologne ads on every re-listen. Musically, star is polished and primped like 2hollis's Hollister-model appearance, the production chiseled into digestible EDM drops and glossy rap beats that hit hard without sounding threatening. If there's any artist who feels poised to bring the digicore/hyperpop backwash that's been circling the underground for years into the mainstream, it's 2hollis. glaive couldn't do it (yet, at least), but with hooks like this and swagger like that, 2hollis certainly has a shot.

Jane Remover has a more complicated relationship with impending fame. In Revengeseekerz's most vulnerable song, "Fadeoutz," they question if the internet popstar they've become is actually what they want, weighing the "fast drugs" and "fast love" against the prospect of closing up shop – "if it means I can live my life." It's a breath of sober reflection located deep in an album that's otherwise wired on adrenalized chaos. Beats that detonate like a box truck full of fireworks and fine China. Songs that redline for three-and-a-half minutes of spite-fueled, swag-dripping, eye-twitching exhales and then break the dial with EKG shocks of thumping techno and galloping dubstep. An album that's so kinetic and jolting, so jam-packed with tell-offs and tell-alls, that even a verse from the incomparably electric Danny Brown verse gets totally subsumed by the maw.

Even in an era when Playboi Carti can "Pop Out" at the top of the Billboard charts with earth-quaking rage-rap exorcisms, it's still hard to imagine Revengeseekerz occupying a similar audience. While 2hollis's music is a few shades sweeter than the likes of Yeat and Ken Carson, it can still serve the same function as zone-out mosh fodder. Beats to knock your buddy/take Xanax to. The rage songs on Revengeseekerz, "angels in camo" and "JRJRJR," are too wordy, spikey, and flamboyant to fade into the background at outdoor festivals and bar-room stereos. There's a clarity-after-crisis pulse to Jane Remover's music that beats a little too irregularly for people who are generally doing well mentally to get it. Even with the flaming sword visuals and gaudy album title, nothing about Revengeseekerz feels like a put-on. The heartbreak, the vengeance, the bluster – it's all too real, too knotty, too revealing to casually glaze over.

star is at its best when 2hollis is going for it with the same abandon Jane Remover displays on Revengeseekerz. The flittering electroclash of "Flash" and the swag-dripping rage-rap of "sidekick" succeed because, on those songs, 2hollis throws his voice into the growling portion of his range where you can hear the veins bulging on his neck and the sweat gleaming on his brow. "girl" nails the other extreme of his sound, a surprisingly sexy neck-breather with fitful bass bumps and so many moans about his lover's pearl necklace that the coital innuendo doesn't go unnoticed.

Unfortunately, there're more songs on star that feel risk-averse and stilted. The breathy restraint of his vocal delivery on "you" and "cope" anonymizes 2hollis's personality. Others, particularly "destroy me" and "burn," feel less like sleek reconfigurations of hyperpop's bloat and more like empty-hearted callbacks to the hollow EDM pop that proliferated during the Diplo era. "nice," one of the album's surefire singles, could be mistaken for a Chainsmokers song. It horseshoes around from subverting stale pop tropes to simply reverting back to them. Revengeseekerz has the opposite problem: it's never vacant, but sometimes too cluttered. The alarm clock bleeps on the monologuing "Dark night castle" are painfully annoying, and on some playthroughs, the overzealous wubs on "TURN UP OR DIE" feel more decadent than enhancing.

2hollis and Jane Remover have had vastly different musical upbringings – 2hollis, the son of Skrillex's publicist and Tortoise's drummer, was incubated for this shit; Jane Remover, an average kid from suburban New Jersey, stumbled into SoundCloud notoriety in their bedroom during lockdown – but have now coalesced in the same zeitgeist. They turn up in each other's "Fans also like" tabs on Spotify (meaning they share an audience) and occupy the same "Internet People" playlists. There's no need to pick one over the other, and I'm not. Revengeseekerz is miles more complex and enduring than star, but 2hollis's greatest songs – all non-album singles: "gold," "trauma," and "afraid" – go toe-to-toe with Jane Remover's best work. If these artists are indeed indicative of what will follow hyperpop and rage over the next half-decade and beyond, then we have a lot to look forward to.

Turnstile - "Never Enough"

I think it's apt, and perhaps intentional, that Brendan Yates is jet-skiing solo in the middle of the ocean in Turnstile's new music video. His band are in uncharted waters. Hardcore bands aren't meant to live as long as Turnstile have. Aren't meant to get as popular as Turnstile have. Aren't meant to sound the way Turnstile sound. Everything they've done thus far has defied what was previously thought possible for an aggressive rock band 20 years beyond MTV's height. Anyone who was at their magical shows in the 2010s could've predicted that Glow On would resonate, but no one anticipated that it would make Turnstile one of the most popular active rock groups in the world. That its meteoric impact would supercharge the underground Turnstile came from and fuel one of the most fertile periods in all of hardcore history, even as the band themselves transcended the culture altogether.

No one could've predicted how the last four years played out, and no one really knows where Turnstile will go next. Their upcoming fourth album, Never Enough, could catch another jet stream and carry them forever skyward, solidifying their name at the top of festival fliers for decades to come and slotting them into regular rotation at every dive bar TouchTunes in America. Or, the bubble they've been improbably floating in since 2015's Nonstop Feeling made them the buzziest band in the genre could finally pop. Glow On very well may have been their peak, and without the undying support of the fickle hardcore underground, which they undoubtedly lost after Glow On made them Jimmy Fallon Big, Turnstile's crowd sizes could plateau or even steadily deflate if there aren't enough festival rock loyalists to fill their ranks.

In reality, all of this forecasting hinges on one simple requirement: is the new music great? The reason Turnstile have succeeded to this point is because they've only ever released great music. I know people in hardcore aren't supposed to admit that Glow On is a great album, but Glow On was a great album. Time & Space was a great album. Nonstop Feeling was a stupendous album. Sure, Turnstile have also been one of the best live bands in the world for over a decade now, but a hardcore band can't get as big as Turnstile have without making songs that people want to scream and jump along to. So, is "Never Enough," the title-track from their new album, a song people want to scream and jump along to? Probably. Well, by virtue of it being a new Turnstile song, almost certainly. But I wouldn't say "Never Enough" is sufficient evidence to confirm that Turnstile have another knockout in the bag.

This is the first time I've ever been so-so on a new Turnstile song. The first time I heard "Mystery," I remember playing it so loud in my bedroom that it shook the frames on my walls and triggered my tinnitus. I didn't care. The way that song chugs and churns and rumbles and then ROARS to life is endlessly exciting. I still get a rush every time I hear that song begin. I don't know if it's a hardcore song or a punk song or a rock song – and I don't care to spend the energy classifying it because I'm having too much fun existing every time "Mystery" comes on. I don't feel that way about "Never Enough." To me, "Never Enough" makes me wonder if Glow On might've actually been enough. The song is structured identically to "Mystery": a glittering analog synth transitions into a crunchy, bouncy, four-chord riff that Brendan Yates yelps over with a delivery that's both animated and tender. It moves through a couple verses and hooks at the same tempo, and then dissolves into another minute and forty five seconds of placid analog synth.

There's a fun, catchy rock song in the middle of "Never Enough," but it's bookended by some of the most tediously boring sounds in Turnstile's entire catalog. There's no reason why that synth should drag on as long as it does, even if it's building to another hardcore drop that will appear on the actual record. Judging a hardcore album based off of one song is preposterous because hardcore isn't a singles genre, but Turnstile aren't making hardcore music anymore. "Never Enough" is a rock song. It's not a bad rock song because Turnstile don't write bad rock songs. The music video is staggeringly beautiful because Turnstile have a superior eye for visuals that's historically managed to make their music feel as cool as it sounds. However, "Never Enough" is the first time I've ever clocked a coolness deficit between the sound and feel of Turnstile's music. An OK lead single is unchartered waters for Turnstile. We'll see where they find land.

Kitchen - Blue Heeler in Ugly Snowlight, Grey on Gray on Gray on White

I recently saw a band from my hometown of Rochester, NY called Bugcatcher who sound like my favorite Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else album, Enjoy the Great Outdoors. Kitchen are another band from Rochester, and their loquaciously titled new album also sounds a helluva lot like Spencer Radcliffe and all the related indie-folk/slowcore/emo (Mount Eerie, Bedhead, older Alex G). This record is extremely long and takes a while to get going. The first song is seven minutes and I think the first six tracks are all acoustic and quiet. However, beginning with "Question Again," the record picks up and never loses me for the rest of its runtime. There's some twangy slowcore ("Days as Long"), ramshackle indie-rock ("Powerlines Loop"), Hotelier-ish jangle-emo ("Courage"), and a 10-minute acoustic song called "Blue Healer" that's one of the most beautiful things I've heard all year. This could sneakily be one of the best indie records of 2025.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to continue reading the final segment of each Chasing Fridays column, where I go in on an older record that I've recently been spending time with.

La Dispute - Wildlife