Do you know what it means to make “penis music”? On their second album, two house, the merry memesters in food house make the assumption that you do. For the uninitiated, the term stems from an old Tumblr meme associated with a goofy drum & bass track filled with onomatopoetic zips, sproinks, and smacks. If you were an active participant in the Twitch chats for Grand Theft role-play streamers in the early days of the pandemic, you might have a working knowledge of the deliberately annoying and debatably real style of music. If not, the post-hyperpop duo’s invocation of the style, toward the end of the brain-rattling opener “hot problems,” is just another colorful scrap of paper in a confetti blast of scrambled internet ephemera that falls erratically across the landscape of two house.
The pace of references is unrelenting. The duo—composed of producer-vocalists Gupi and Fraxiom—offers up footnote-worthy nods to urbanism YouTubers, Adam Levine sexts, the CEO of PepsiCo, tertiary characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog games, obscure hyperpop scene drama, Atlanta public transit, and all manner of anthropomorphic animals, among other arcane interests best understood through deep-dives on DeviantArt and AO3. Even if you can clock everything that’s going on in the half-sung, half-rapped logorrhea, the effect is overwhelming—like you’re battling cascading browser pop-ups on an especially sketchy piracy site.
food house have been uncompromising jokesters since they first broke out in the pandemic-era hyperpop scene with “Thos Moser,” a nauseating, squelching pop song that plays like a YouTube Poop edit sourced on electroclash and MAGFest-ready EDM. Surreal, intense, and anxiety-inducing—and full of memorable threats to urinate on Zedd—it was among the best early hyperpop efforts, adopting the most pranksterish aspects of PC Music’s hyperreal vision of pop. As the progenitors of the genre have moved toward sleeker, more stylish versions of the sound—whether that’s embracing bleary-eyed shoegaze or fried internet rap, or sometimes both—two house reflects the duo’s determination to double down, jettisoning anything resembling subtlety or restraint in favor of broken-glowstick maximalism.
The approach is most evident when food house go full “terminal brainrot,” which they memorably diagnose themselves with on “vitamin d freestyle.” The beat of “IDGAFOS,” for example, flips between jittery East Coast club music, queasy IDM abstractions, and ascendant house gestures. Fraxiom, meanwhile, cuts through the chaos with a pitch-shifted whine, rapping about lolcows, enemas, and scoliosis. It’s a lot, but that’s the point. It’s music by and for people who spend too much time online, which is an easy way to end up feeling as burned out and overwhelmed as the music does.
For the first time, the duo lets some anxiety and discomfort creep into the lyrics. Garish as the music is, it can be easy to miss the real feelings embedded within. But they open up a bit on songs like “everybody’s eyes,” on which Fraxiom addresses her father’s disrespect for her gender transition: “Come on man, just call me your daughter for the hell of it,” she pleads. “I would go so far as to call all the past irrelevant.” Surprisingly vulnerable moments are littered throughout the record, but food house never dwell for too long; soon, they’re back to rapping about Animal Crossing characters. If this sounds tonally confusing, on some level it is, but when it works, it underscores that for food house, the endless streams of references and lurid production are entirely earnest, too. two house bears out one of the great posters’ proverbs: to be cringe is to be free.
