Maybe you, too, felt the alarmist tone in the air when it was announced last October that there were no rap songs in the Billboard Hot 100's Top 40 for the first time since 1990. "Are we living through a rap drought?" CNN asked. The news resurfaced lingering questions about whether rap has lost its grip on the culture, and if it is capable of creating new stars for splintering attention spans. Never mind that hip-hop influence still courses through much of what tops the charts, or that Kendrick Lamar had dominated the previous year and would cap the streak with back-to-back wins for record of the year at the Grammys. Where was the next Kendrick, the next Drake?
There's a willful ignorance at the core of many of these questions: a refusal to acknowledge the changing terrain, how the charts themselves keep tinkering with the formula trying to track a music landscape they don't quite have a grasp on anymore. The old guard can't make sense of an oddity like NBA YoungBoy, the Baton Rouge standout packing shows regardless of chart positioning. The Houston rapper Don Toliver presents another counterpoint: His fifth album, Octane, feels like a traditional star turn calibrated for the modern age. Imbued with the eye-opening recognition of a rap padawan finally coming into his own, it is the sound of all the right bolts tightening at once, spurred on by roots-tracing self-discovery.
Toliver has shown flashes of this potential on his last two albums, Love Sick (2023) and Hardstone Psycho (2024), yet those records primarily sought what I referred to as "a post-rap vision that functions as atmosphere first and foremost." Octane is still atmospheric, but leans intently into the intensity of a rattling bass, while building on semi-romantic soul with trilled, singsong raps that feel exceptionally defined. The album is billed as the first Don Toliver LP to be executive produced by the artist himself — but even without knowing that, it is comprehensively the most refined and cohesive music of his career. Almost all of that growth can be credited to the built-up confidence in his voice and its undergirding in real, on-the-ground precedent, an artist offering a legible sense of his own identity. He does so by establishing himself within a lineage, grounding his music in the soundscape of his hometown, even while he ventures beyond its borders.
It would be overselling things to dub Octane some kind of nü screw innovation, but it is an album living in the shadow of local history, in conversation with the crawling, drawled music of his city and the laid-back energy of its slow-rolling, candy-painted bass machines. For much of his career, Toliver has moved like a thrill-seeker stranded in Astroworld, the theme-park-based LP by his Cactus Jack label boss Travis Scott. It was on that album that Toliver emerged, as a guest on the song "Can't Say," sounding like Scott if he'd swallowed El DeBarge. Both Toliver and Scott are Houston natives (with Astroworld standing as a hometown monument of sorts), but neither would have previously qualified as Houston rappers in the classical sense. If you've heard 2023's UTOPIA, you know this to still be true of Scott: It is an album in search of an epic thunderdome, whose sound is from nowhere in particular. But Octane makes a concerted effort to fall between two orbits, reveling in beautiful dark twisted fantasy and Lacville pride. When Toliver raps, "I'm in H-Town, this a hell of a vibe," on "ATM," that vibe feels like something he is actively channeling — not least because he's constantly gone off lean.
Lean has become just another hallmark of post-regional rap since the 2010s, thanks in large part to rappers like Future, whose Dirty Sprite releases gave the cough-syrup cocktail a mainstream currency. But it emerged as one of the key cultural forces informing the late icon DJ Screw, as his patented Screw tapes birthed the "chopped and screwed" production technique in the early '90s — and that codeine effect can be heard at the heart of this album. "Got drank in my cup, on Kirko … Not sippin' on green, it's purple," Toliver raps on the opener, nodding to Houston predecessor Kirko Bangz. "Drop the octane in the styrofoam / Keep the 9 Beretta, it's a two-tone," he adds on "Opposite."
There are more than a half-dozen mentions of lean use on Octane, but its reverberations go without saying: The vocals are often freaked-out, woozy and frayed, while song structures are marked by the disorientation of slowed time. "Body" mangles and distorts its Justin Timberlake sample into sludgy echoes. On "All the Signs" and "Excavator," Toliver's voice dissolves into syrup mid-song. The always-night atmosphere of strip clubs seems to take on a purple tint on "Tuition," its synths whirring in the periphery like streaks of sparkles during photopsia. If many of these features have been co-opted by trap, Toliver sounds as if he is consciously straddling a line between Metro Boomin and Houston pioneer turned UTOPIA engineer Mike Dean.
More than anything, Octane embodies the slow, loud and bangin' trifecta that Houston rapper Z-Ro turned into a coat of arms — and adds sci-fi swangin' to the mix. Just as two dope boyz treating the Cadillac like a U.F.O. eventually led to spaceships on Bankhead, Toliver's latest feels like slab music for the International Space Station. The intersection of luxury whips and astronomy were admittedly top of mind for him: The rapper has acknowledged that the album was built around a personal fantasy of living out of a Nissan Skyline or vintage Beamer somewhere like Big Sur, where you can see the constellations. That sense of cruising into the universal expanse is heard in the endless horizon of "Tiramisu" or the zonked-out, spacely arrangement of "Gemstone." To a greater extent, you could think of it as the subtext of the album: something zonal becoming more decentralized.
The same day that Octane was released, Houston rap lost one of its most important exporters: Michael "5000" Watts, founder of the label Swishahouse, who helped smuggle the chopped and screwed sound from tapes to radio with Mike Jones and Paul Wall, died on Jan. 30 at 52. Watts was an early adopter, a north side Screw rival who always paid homage to the originator but was instrumental in the sound's broader success in the years after Screw's death. I see Toliver as an expansion of that mission to have more of Houston speak and be heard. That isn't to cast him as a torchbearer, or say that he owes it to anyone to signpost his local allegiances. As Bun B once said, ironically about Watts himself: "As generations change, the younger kids come in, they don't care who's making it." The spirit of a thing often overrides genealogy, and doesn't always manifest in the traditional ways. But it is through Don Toliver's connection to H-Town and its vibe that the rapper has been able to realize a fuel-injected music all his own.
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