Somewhere in between talking about how it feels to perform live and whether her collaborator Gupi “beats the Otaku allegations,” Fraxiom makes a startling declaration: Furries deserve their own Drake.
“Hear me out!” she cries. “I literally think that furries need a Drake—we need a slow R&B song about hot daddy bears.”
two house, the long-awaited sequel to the 2020 hyperpop holy text food house, is not furry Drake fanfic. But the furry culture that Fraxiom grew up around heavily influenced the songwriting on this album, which is so unabashedly weird and vulnerable that it’s basically a kind of cringe warfare, a call to unleash your strangest, most annoying self. It’s an album with songs that mention vore and frotting in the same verse, that speak on the joys of “fictional gator baes” and insult someone by “going fucking upstairs neighbor on your grave.” The music is so ridiculous and rabid you almost miss the misery and anger lurking beside the jokes. two house was really the project that kept Fraxiom from quitting music—the antidote to a depression sinkhole. “ Shout out to the psychiatrist Adam, who put me on Wellbutrin and got me to start writing songs again,” she tells me over a FaceTime call.
food house is also Gupi, the electronic producer, Berklee grad, and child of Tony Hawk who’s basically Fraxiom’s partner-in-prank. They tore across the hyperpop scene in 2020 with the gloriously abrasive “Thos Moser.” The beat retched like Tin Man choking on his own silvery puke while Fraxiom called out NYU kids and threatened to pee on Zedd. For a moment, it felt like a blueprint for future pop: the domain of the true freaks, the kids without concern for clout-chasing or coolness optics, breastfed on nightcore and YouTube parodies.
But after the duo released food house, they mostly stopped dropping songs as a unit. The feverish pandemic hyperpop scene dispersed; food house reckoned with personal issues and the industry. “We were stressed out about making things for the sake of others,” explains Gupi. Their first album was released by Dylan Brady’s Dog Show Records, which is under Diplo’s Mad Decent, which they repudiate. “Oh, so y'all are just gonna get a 50% cut of this really awesome, borderline genre-defining art we made, but you're not gonna help us with touring, advertising, A&R, or anything that an industry person is actually supposed to do?” Fraxiom groans.
Everything about two house was done on their own terms, from the time they took to drop the album to the independent release to the way that the lyrics were clearly not line-edited for wider audience appeal (“smoke it out your ass like Human Centipede,” goes one). Gupi, who produced nearly the whole album, has verses and hooks for the first time; Fraxiom, more confident in their songwriting than ever, pulls off a slew of earworm flows and completely improvised lyrics. The vocals and beats shiver and oscillate in such chaotic harmony that it’s hard to believe Fraxiom and Gupi mostly made the album while in separate cities. Even over FaceTime, it’s obvious how well they get along—sending the other into hysterics and goofily bickering over little details. “You’re the only producer I feel comfortable being this vulnerable with, so…” Fraxiom coos to Gupi at one point; at another, Gupi says several of Fraxiom’s verses made them cry.
This is an unholy, unfiltered fiesta, with enough fried allusions—see the Poppy Playtime flow tribute on “now 2”—to make a KnowYourMeme admin proud. Gupi’s most electric beats teleport me back to the golden era of lockdown hyperpop, when every song downed genres like shots and the sound hadn’t yet been formulated into a set of tropes. Highlight “td bank” unleashes a geyser of pixels while “computerpunk” smacks like a clog-wearing raver is jumpstyle-dancing all over your face.
Any hater could screenshot a line like “I slay the house down, girlypop and bussy cunt vagina” and declare this the downfall of music, but that’s partly the point. Recording the music and listening back, even Frax grimaced at some of her lyrics, but left them in because they highlight the absurdity of her life. That directness was partly inspired by Kendrick Lamar and Chappell Roan openly talking their shit; other influences are maybe more obvious: PC Music, YouTube oddities like Sue DJ.
Beneath its Epic Rap Battles of Herstory surface, two house is the duo’s most heartfelt music to date. They open up about being hurt by narcissists, ex-best friends, even family members. Fraxiom says they had to axe a couple of songs because they were too overt, which surprised me because some here are basically full-on hate-letters, with everything but the offender’s SSN yelled out. Lost inside the rattling synth-rain of “everybody’s eyes,” Fraxiom calls out her dad for not recognizing her gender identity: “I heard you call Twitter X/I've been trans for longer than that, and I still don't get respect.” There’s a real moment of catharsis on the final song, “dumb ways to die,” after Fraxiom recalls an easier, more innocent time in 2019: pre-industry, pre-food house, when everyone liked her. “I'm a crash out with no identity and no integrity, I'm a parasite, I'm a grifter, I'm a—” they yell, before their voice suddenly shimmers as they switch to self-confidence and declare that they’re “trying to own my freak” over colossal, skybound drums.
You can adore or abhor the memes; what makes this album really hit are these reflections on alienation and self-love that anyone can relate to. “It’s crazy 200 bpm hyperpop, but the songwriting is so good and the lyrics are so real that it might even be able to bring tears out of someone who pays a mortgage,” Fraxiom says.
It’s sweet to see an album this defiant drop at a moment when America’s being overrun by transphobes and even progressives blame wokeness for damaging their political chances. food house thinks this conservative cultural shift is partly why people have turned against hyperpop now. “Everyone who was telling me ‘cringe is dead, be yourself’ five years ago, those same people are calling me retarded now. I hope that the lyrics on this album challenge that,” Fraxiom says. “I need everyone to get annoyingly woke again right now. I want you to get mad at me because I didn’t say your neopronoun, like, I don’t give a fuck!”
Even if hate mobs continue to swarm over social media, food house isn’t planning on quitting the fight and their lingua franca of internet culture, so much of which was built by queer communities. They feel the same with hyperpop: even if it’s been maligned and abandoned by some, there are still young outcasts finding new ways to express themselves with madcap beats and gender-fucking vocals. “Maybe DIY hyperpop is not as big of a thing as it was in 2020. But there’s a lot of movements: breakcore, digicore, cybergrind… even if they’re in a different scene, you usually look and have 30 mutuals with them anyways,” Frax smiles. “It’s all the same shit.”
What I’m listening to:
