Album Review: OCTANE by Don Toliver
On OCTANE, tenderness arrives with terms and conditions, every declaration of love shadowed by a hand reaching for something else.
A woman gets called the most important thing in the room while a gun occupies the same sentence, mentioned like furniture. Don Toliver’s voice doesn’t register the juxtaposition. That obliviousness threads through every track here, a record obsessed with keeping someone close without ever questioning the mechanics of the grip. Driving fast. Calling late. Pulling up unannounced. Buying Tiffany after a fight. The behaviors stack into a profile that never quite looks in the mirror, which is a running theme throughout OCTANE.
“How am I supposed to let you go?” opens “Secondhand” with something close to anguish, but the song also mentions a chopper outside and Black Hawk helicopters in the same breath as Gucci store runs. The question loses its weight when surrounded by so much elsewhere. On “Body,” a Justin Timberlake sample gets yanked into a chorus where “I’ll pull up and spray” lands directly after “I don’t play about her.” He means it as devotion. The threat-as-compliment trick runs so deep he never realizes the wires are touching.
“All the Signs” is the most revealing cut here with the help of Teezo Touchdown. “Guilty if I love you was a crime” sounds romantic until the verses spell out what that love looks like in practice. Fighting, cussing, then makeup sex positioned as resolution. “I’m your lover, I’m your homie, I’m your twin, I’m your partner, not your problem.” The list extends further, as if stacking enough relationship words will outweigh the cycle described in the same track. When he calls her “my favorite car, I wanna test it” and then “gadget” a line later, the possession language stops even trying to hide.
Yeat drifts through “Rendezvous” alongside Toliver, both rappers shrugging through lines about greed and reading rooms while guns rest in laps on safety. “We don’t need to say it, we just read the room.” The vibe check doubles as an excuse for not examining anything. Nobody asks what the room contains. Travis Scott wanders onto “Rosary” to turn fidelity into jewelry. “My girl on me like a rosary” carries devotional overtones until both rappers spend the rest of the track describing conquest and body positioning. The commitment talk and the hookup talk occupy the same sentences without friction, as if monogamy and scoring are the same transaction.
A woman in “Tuition” strips for college money while Toliver admits he’s “too toxic” and pivots to calling himself Carmelo. The track notices her situation without caring about it. “Tryna make college tuition at the West End” gets stated and dropped. No follow-up. No curiosity about the woman’s math. Just the next verse. On “K9,” SahBabii raps about giving a woman “a son and a daughter” in the same breath as stuffing drugs in foreign car seats and calling her “Boar Head” for swallowing. Toliver sings “don’t tell me you love me,” then “the relationship that keeps me coming back.” The simultaneous distrust and need hovers unexamined, like a fact of weather.
One of the album’s rare honest moments surfaces on “Sweet Home.” “I needed more time for my relationship” drops near the end, sandwiched between drinking confessions and naked grotto hookups. California and Houston both get named as places to run toward or away from. The self-awareness flickers, then vanishes into another chorus about bottles and tomorrow being someone else’s problem.
Money flashes constantly but never as security. The ATM in the title track leads straight to an 8 a.m. strip club. “Gemstone” piles car brands and compass directions until the verse starts sounding like a geographic anxiety attack. “Excavator” turns cash into escalators and respirators, heaping imagery until the point dissolves. The spending talks louder than any lyric about love, but the spending itself is nervous, compulsive, a way of filling silences the songs won’t name.
Drugs follow an identical script. Fanta and codeine in “Secondhand.” Angel dust in “ATM.” Shrooms in “Rosary” and “Excavator.” Molly scattered across multiple tracks. The substances hit as casual punctuation, never examined, never regretted. “I was way too geeked, I can’t come outside” on “ATM” gets no follow-up. The intoxication explains behaviors without excusing them, and Toliver shows no interest in the difference.
The admission on “Pleasure’s Mine” comes closest to self-awareness. “Know I told you lies way too many times.” But the words lodge inside a hook, delivered with melodic gloss rather than genuine reckoning. Read between the lines, he croons, as if opacity were a gift. The album continues offering that trade. Accept vagueness as intimacy, accept control as care.
Toliver’s voice remains gorgeous, that soulful robot tone (despite still sounding like his boss in most songs) sharpened across four albums. The Houston lineage registers in every syrupy hook, plus he knows how to pick rock-solid beats from Cardo to Honorable C.N.O.T.E. But the lyrics describe a man who grips instead of holds, who threatens when he means to compliment, who buys instead of apologizes. The record presents these habits without critique or distance. Nobody on OCTANE stops to wonder whether “I’ll go crazy about her” registers more as warning than worship. The songs are honest about the behavior and blind to its meaning, and that blindness is the most revealing thing the album could say.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite(s): “All the Signs,” “Sweet Home”