Don Toliver finds his voice in Houston on ‘Octane’ : NPR

Perhaps you, too, felt the alarmist tone within the air when it was introduced final October that there have been no rap songs within the Billboard Sizzling 100’s High 40 for the primary time since 1990. “Are we residing by means of a rap drought?” CNN requested. The information resurfaced lingering questions on whether or not rap has misplaced its grip on the tradition, and whether it is able to creating new stars for splintering consideration spans. By no means thoughts that hip-hop affect nonetheless programs by means of a lot of what tops the charts, or that Kendrick Lamar had dominated the earlier yr and would cap the streak with back-to-back wins for file of the yr on the Grammys. The place was the subsequent Kendrick, the subsequent Drake?

There is a willful ignorance on the core of many of those questions: a refusal to acknowledge the altering terrain, how the charts themselves hold tinkering with the method making an attempt to trace a music panorama they do not fairly have a grasp on anymore. The previous guard cannot make sense of an oddity like NBA YoungBoy, the Baton Rouge standout packing exhibits no matter chart positioning. The Houston rapper Don Toliver presents one other counterpoint: His fifth album, Octane, seems like a standard star flip calibrated for the fashionable age. Imbued with the eye-opening recognition of a rap padawan lastly coming into his personal, it’s the sound of all the appropriate bolts tightening directly, spurred on by roots-tracing self-discovery.

Toliver has proven flashes of this potential on his final two albums, Love Sick (2023) and Hardstone Psycho (2024), but these data primarily sought what I referred to as “a post-rap imaginative and prescient that features as environment firstly.” Octane continues to be atmospheric, however leans intently into the depth of a rattling bass, whereas constructing on semi-romantic soul with trilled, singsong raps that really feel exceptionally outlined. The album is billed as the primary Don Toliver LP to be government produced by the artist himself — however even with out realizing that, it’s comprehensively essentially the most refined and cohesive music of his profession. Virtually all of that progress might be credited to the built-up confidence in his voice and its undergirding in actual, on-the-ground precedent, an artist providing a legible sense of his personal id. He does so by establishing himself inside a lineage, grounding his music within the soundscape of his hometown, even whereas he ventures past its borders.

It will be overselling issues to dub Octane some type of nü screw innovation, however it’s an album residing within the shadow of native historical past, in dialog with the crawling, drawled music of his metropolis and the laid-back vitality of its slow-rolling, candy-painted bass machines. For a lot of his profession, 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 visitor on the music “Cannot Say,” sounding like Scott if he’d swallowed El DeBarge. Each Toliver and Scott are Houston natives (with Astroworld standing as a hometown monument of kinds), however neither would have beforehand certified as Houston rappers within the classical sense. In case you’ve heard 2023’s UTOPIA, you understand this to nonetheless be true of Scott: It’s an album in quest of an epic thunderdome, whose sound is from nowhere specifically. However Octane makes a concerted effort to fall between two orbits, reveling in lovely darkish twisted fantasy and Lacville delight. When Toliver raps, “I am in H-City, this a hell of a vibe,” on “ATM,” that vibe seems like one thing he’s actively channeling — not least as a result of he is continually gone off lean.

Lean has turn out to be simply one other hallmark of post-regional rap because the 2010s, thanks largely to rappers like Future, whose Soiled Sprite releases gave the cough-syrup cocktail a mainstream foreign money. However it emerged as one of many key cultural forces informing the late icon DJ Screw, as his patented Screw tapes birthed the “chopped and screwed” manufacturing method within the early ’90s — and that codeine impact might be heard on the coronary heart of this album. “Bought drank in my cup, on Kirko … Not sippin’ on inexperienced, it is purple,” Toliver raps on the opener, nodding to Houston predecessor Kirko Bangz. “Drop the octane within the styrofoam / Maintain the 9 Beretta, it is a two-tone,” he provides on “Reverse.”

There are greater than a half-dozen mentions of lean use on Octane, however its reverberations go with out saying: The vocals are sometimes freaked-out, woozy and frayed, whereas music constructions are marked by the disorientation of slowed time. “Physique” mangles and distorts its Justin Timberlake pattern into sludgy echoes. On “All of the Indicators” and “Excavator,” Toliver’s voice dissolves into syrup mid-song. The always-night environment of strip golf equipment appears to tackle a purple tint on “Tuition,” its synths whirring within the periphery like streaks of sparkles throughout photopsia. If many of those options have been co-opted by entice, Toliver sounds as if he’s consciously straddling a line between Metro Boomin and Houston pioneer turned UTOPIA engineer Mike Dean.

Greater than something, Octane embodies the sluggish, loud and bangin‘ trifecta that Houston rapper Z-Ro was a coat of arms — and provides sci-fi swangin’ to the combination. Simply as two dope boyz treating the Cadillac like a U.F.O. ultimately led to spaceships on Bankhead, Toliver’s newest seems like slab music for the Worldwide Area Station. The intersection of luxurious whips and astronomy have been admittedly high of thoughts for him: The rapper has acknowledged that the album was constructed round a private fantasy of residing out of a Nissan Skyline or classic Beamer someplace like Massive Sur, the place you possibly can see the constellations. That sense of cruising into the common expanse is heard within the countless horizon of “Tiramisu” or the zonked-out, spacely association of “Gemstone.” To a larger extent, you may consider it because the subtext of the album: one thing zonal turning into extra decentralized.

The identical day that Octane was launched, Houston rap misplaced certainly one of its most essential exporters: Michael “5000” Watts, founding father 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 facet Screw rival who all the time paid homage to the originator however was instrumental within the sound’s broader success within the years after Screw’s loss of life. I see Toliver as an enlargement of that mission to have extra of Houston communicate and be heard. That is not to solid him as a torchbearer, or say that he owes it to anybody to signpost his native allegiances. As Bun B as soon as stated, paradoxically about Watts himself: “As generations change, the youthful youngsters are available in, they do not care who’s making it.” The spirit of a factor usually overrides family tree, and does not all the time manifest within the conventional methods. However it’s by means of Don Toliver’s connection to H-City and its vibe that the rapper has been capable of understand a fuel-injected music all his personal.