This story appears in i-D 376, “The Lore Issue.” Get your copy of the print magazine here.
written by SAFI BUGEL
photography KINGSLEY IFILL
styling CLARE BYRNE
It’s a rainy November afternoon and Rommulas cuts a striking figure among the tourists and families in Hyde Park. Not only is he tall, androgynous, and handsome, with long, tousled hair and heavily kohled eyes—he’s also topless under his jacket, despite the weather. Moving slowly and talking little, he stops to let a squirrel climb his baggy leather trousers. “Oh my God, that’s a fucking parrot,” he points up, suddenly gushing with the enthusiasm I recognise from clips of him bouncing around onstage. “You guys have parrots here?!”
The 21-year-old, LA-based musician is in town to play a sold-out show with 2hollis and The Hellp—part of a tour so extensive he can’t remember how many dates they’ve done. Together Rommulas and 2hollis form part of Boyliife, one of the hottest crews of internet rappers of the moment. Even as the newcomer of the bunch, with just a handful of tracks to his name, Rommulas has 375,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers at the time of writing. Here, though, people in the park stop and stare bewilderedly. One guy yells, “Michael Jackson!”
Somehow, Rommulas is equally enigmatic to those who consider themselves fans. There are TikToks and Reddit threads devoted to unearthing basic facts about his identity: Who is he, how old is he, where is he really from? His digital footprint offers hardly any clues. His discography hovers around 15 minutes in total and his Instagram grid consists of seven posts (including a Gucci Mane meme) that feel transported from the Tumblr era. If you Google him, you might find a few photographs, including a screenshot of an old Storm Management modelling profile.
My expectations for gleaning any information from Rommulas himself are low, but over a video call a few weeks later, he’s surprisingly open, rambling with the air of someone who’s not yet been media-trained. We discuss his family life, his Mexican heritage, his friends, and his girlfriend. It turns out it’s his first time being interviewed. “How am I doing?” he asks, grinning.
I ask whether the public mystique is intentional, and how he feels about the online theories about him. “To a degree, I love it. I think it’s hilarious. I always have a good laugh looking at it,” he says. “But it also can be weird. I’m a very normal and relatable human, but I’m also a very private person. I try to just focus on making music and having fun doing it, keeping it a sacred thing with my friends.”
Rommulas grew up in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, an upbringing he describes as “adventurous” and “rowdy,” soundtracked by ’90s hip-hop, noughties R&B, and later, experimental electronic music like Arca’s. He regularly travelled to Mexico, where he inherited a house from his grandfather. He started secondary school during what he refers to as the “SoundCloud era—where every kid wanted to be a rapper.” After connecting with fellow Boyliife member Nate Sib over Snapchat, he began heading to his parents’ place to make rudimentary trap beats. Rommulas didn’t even have his own laptop back then. Sib and 2hollis, whom he also met over the internet, were shocked when they heard what he’d created. “Nate was just like, ‘What the fuck? Hollis is gonna freak out!’” Rommulas tells me, bashfully. “Hollis came in and I played it for him. He was like, ‘Nah, you guys are trolling me. Why are you low-key good?’”
“Life is a moving train. It’s completely different now.”
rommulas
In May 2025, he released his first single “left to right,” a distorted vignette of reggaeton, trap, and pop, produced by 2hollis. Within a few months, “No Me Importa” and “insane” followed, before his debut EP ANIMÁL in December—a seven-track, 15-minute romp through glitching electronics, syncopated percussion, and auto-tune-pitched yaps. The combination is so explosive that Rommulas refers to it as “its own Frankenstein.”
He’s yet to release his own production work, but he’s keen to in the near future, once he’s built up the skills and confidence. “I wanted to approach it with respect, especially when Hollis and Nate have built careers themselves off this. I didn’t want to just step in and be like, ‘look what I’m doing,’ you know? I want to earn my foot in the door.” He compares the etiquette to that of tattooing, the industry he worked in before music. “You have to complete an apprenticeship and work tireless hours. I’m trying to do that.”
The last year has been a blur for Rommulas. Things seem to have changed so suddenly. As we speak, he scrolls through his camera roll to recall everything, shaking his head in disbelief. “Life is a moving train. It’s completely different now.”
These days, he tells me he gets stopped by fans all the time. The other week, he was out getting food with his mum when a girl asked him to speak to her sister on FaceTime. “She’s, like, sobbing, crying,” Rommulas tells me, still baffled. “My mum was like, ‘What the hell?’” He’s become aware of where he might get spotted, even with his hood up, and by whom. “I get Spidey Senses. There’s a uniform and an energy that radiates.”
Despite the glamour of his new lifestyle, he enjoys any downtime he can get. He likes to hang out with his girlfriend in Toronto. (He’s getting pho with her after our call.) He also speaks dreamily of returning to his parents’ place in LA: “I haven’t had that in a really long time. It’s really nice to have my feet on some dirt.” His visit to Hyde Park felt special for that reason. “I don’t think I’d had that much silence over the whole tour,” he continues, gazing off-screen. “It was so therapeutic for me.”
Still, his goals are big. Rommulas understands music as his destiny. “I see my own tours. I see festivals. I see a big Mexico show,” he says with wide-eyed optimism rather than cockiness. “I see being an important figure in the Latin community. And I see blessings.”
in the lead image JACKET AND TOP ANN DEMEULEMEESTER, JEWELLERY ROMMULAS’ OWN
groomer PORSCHE POON USING VICTORIA BECKHAM BEAUTY AT TOTAL WORLD
styling assistants CHARLOTTE FOLEY & SANDA BELL
location THE MAGAZINE AT SERPENTINE NORTH & FRIENDS OF OURS
production THE MORRISON GROUP
on site production DARCIE DUCKMANTON AT ANGELS PRODUCTION
post production TAXI BLUES