Don Toliver: OCTANE Album Review

Even with all his maximalist verve; his Easy Rider and Sons of Anarchy-style leather regalia; his shoulder-rubbing with Gap Band legend Charlie Wilson; the superproducers spawning at his studio’s threshold—even in the face of all that, Don Toliver’s allure can be boiled down to something simpler: the fundamentals of his sound. He’s adept at layering catchy hooks over lush beds, and his effortless melodies bounce between octaves. At his best, his marriage of delivery and production is meticulous, mesmerizing even when there’s no substance beneath it. It’s Toliver’s best trick, one forged as Travis Scott’s finest apprentice: Make the empty feel grand, without giving away the banality of what’s being said.

OCTANE, Toliver’s fifth album, arrives as he’s still searching for a foothold in rap’s superstar tier. It follows 2024’s five-disc, 20-track Hardstone Psycho, in a hip-hop landscape where patience for highly manufactured event albums is running thin. In its attempt to be conceptual Hardstone Psycho wound up sticking too rigidly to one aesthetic, but it was the hollowness of the lyrics that turned the whole thing into an ordeal. Conversely, Toliver’s 2021 breakout, Life of a DON, toed the line between intimate and expansive while avoiding the churn of standard melodic rap by pairing polished production with Houston backroom falsettos and runs. It’s a strange balancing act: His music lands better when it focuses on little more than curating a vibe, switching on autopilot for a smooth ride with only the night sky overheard.

OCTANE is patterned on the aesthetic of a rally-car meet, though it’s clear that the onslaught of spectacle is a distraction from Toliver’s most interesting mode: a moody crooner whose aimless meanderings eventually allow him to break through his disinterested shell. His fifth full-length project offers no surprises, oscillating between moody trap ballads and booming hype tracks. “E85” is hectic, with blaring synths that act as a battering ram for a dizzying array of strings, hums, and beeps as he croons about dreaming of his lover on a desert highway. The mutant marching band composition on “Gemstone” achieves something similar. But his best beat selections—BNYX and company’s hypnotic “Tuition,” and Cardo and Polo Boy Shawty’s crawling recreation of Houston’s swaggering, lowrider groove on “Tiramisu”—turn away from the high-energy ethos; they’re murkier, filled with negative space and gloom. “Call me when you need it late at night, you know I’m slidin’,” he murmurs on “Tiramisu,” letting his syllables crawl between the synths and hi-hats, as if begging over the phone.

Despite underwhelming stretches, the album retains enough moments of personality to breathe life into even ordinary lines. Toliver’s voice, the way it vibrates and undulates around certain words, can anchor a track all on its own; sometimes it sounds like he’s singing to just one girl in a room full of people. This intimacy is a precious metal on OCTANE: You want to bottle up the odd way he yelps “Geeker!” on “Body,” or the falsettos and existential musings on “Long Way to Calabasas,” where, his voice wavering, Toliver asks, “I found drugs, found peace, found happiness/Lookin’ in a mirror, is it happiness?”

Familiar warts persist. The hyper-repetitive, end-rhyming structure on “Body” is compounded by uninspired writing. Travis Scott’s feature on “Rosary” is basically a less interesting copy-and-paste of his feature on “Love Galore.” The inane, rambling “Rendezvous,” with Yeat, feels destined for the hottest party at the Texas A&M sophomore dorm. But Toliver’s timely inclusions buoy OCTANE’s energy: covering himself and an inspired Teezo Touchdown with mandolin effects on “All the Signs,” juxtaposing his croons against a growling SahBabii (who steals the spotlight) on “K9,” even adding an earnest “Sweet Home Alabama” interpolation on the closer. However low-stakes, these are the moments that sound like an artist who’s more interested in having fun than producing a blockbuster record. But Toliver has good instincts, and if he followed them, he could probably do both.