Don Toliver on Hitting No. 1: “I Swear, I Planned the Whole S***”

When most recording artists talk about scoring their first No. 1 album, they tend to summon a little humility. Nobody saw it coming. They’re just grateful to be here. Dreams really do come true.

Don Toliver is not most artists.

“I swear, I planned the whole shit,” Toliver tells THR with matter-of-fact confidence, calling on a day off from his ongoing Octane arena tour. After releasing 2024’s Hardstone Psycho, he says, he sensed an opening: “I went right into Octane mode, and I felt like I just needed to crank it up. Octane was supposed to be the package for the game because the game was quiet.”

Quiet, at least, by recent hip-hop standards. Rap remains one of the most listened to genres in America, but its grip on the center of pop culture has loosened from the late 2010s, when Kendrick Lamar, Drake and J. Cole dominated the charts, while younger stars like Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion and Roddy Ricch were breaking through behind them. More recently, the genre has produced fewer obvious new global superstars, just as country and Latin music have expanded their mainstream reach.

Toliver saw that lull less as a crisis than as an opportunity. The question, as he saw it, was who would move first.

“There were a couple guys I was worried about,” he says of other rappers he thought might seize the moment before he did. “They didn’t pop out, and I was able to do my thing.”

He did indeed. Octane, Toliver’s fifth studio album, became his first No. 1.

For Toliver, that moment had been a long time coming. Born Caleb Zackery Toliver and raised in Alief, a working-class neighborhood in southwest Houston, he grew up surrounded by music. His father, Bongo, recorded with artists on Houston label Swishahouse, while Toliver began scribbling rhymes in school notebooks and making rudimentary recordings through a PlayStation microphone. By ninth grade, he was performing Kanye West’s “See You in My Nightmares” and “Love Lockdown” at a school talent show. He recorded his first song in high school, then spent years hustling independently before breaking through in 2018, when fellow Houstonian Travis Scott featured him on Astroworld and signed him to his Cactus Jack label.

“I didn’t know what Travis was possibly going to be able to do for me,” Toliver says. “I just knew where I wanted to go, how I wanted to do it and what it probably took to do it. And Travis, he dealt with me. I probably annoyed the shit out of him. But he answered the phone when he could and showed me love.”

For Octane, Toliver wanted the album to have not just a sound but a physical and visual identity. Cars, speed and rally culture became central to the project’s look, and he wanted to make the music inside an environment that matched that aesthetic. His first idea was to build a geodesic dome in the woods, bring his cars there and record inside it. Then reality intervened: “That shit can get mad expensive.”

Instead, Toliver landed on Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains above L.A. Its white telescope domes and industrial structures gave him the atmosphere he was looking for — not just to make music but also as a setting for photography and video connected to Octane.

“When I build a world, it’s an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I’m this person, this is where I’m at,’ ” he says. ” ‘This is where I reside, and these are the things that happen in this world while you’re getting this soundtrack.’ ” Mount Wilson, he goes on, supplied exactly the “industrial, old shit, brutalist-type feels” he was after.

Toliver says he felt “a jolt of energy” making Octane, his first project created from start to finish since becoming a father. He and singer Kali Uchis welcomed their first child in 2024.

His son isn’t old enough to understand Toliver’s music yet, but the father already knows whose review will ultimately matter most. “If my son is 10, 15 years old and he’s still like, ‘Yo, my dad is the best artist in the world.’ That’s my goal,” he says. “That’s all I care about.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.