Since breaking out on the Travis Scott ASTROWORLD highlight “CAN’T SAY,” Don Toliver has propelled himself into hip-hop’s mainstream with melodic stylings that willfully and efficiently blur the bounds between rap and R&B. Following the leather-clad rock star moves of his 2024 album HARDSTONE PSYCHO, the Houston rapper returns roughly a year and a half later with an album that enhances that larger-than-life aesthetic while remaining committed to the ultramodern sound he’s spent half a decade cultivating. He opens OCTANE with a fuzzy, Isley Brothers-esque funk rock flair on “E85,” a track that soon renews itself in a more maximalist mode. With a seemingly unstoppable energy, he catalogs romantic exploits and sexual conquests with aplomb on revved-up tracks like “Gemstone” and “Rendezvous.” Continuing the Neptunes worship from HARDSTONE’s hit single “ATTITUDE,” he borrows from Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body” for the salacious “Body” and from a broader Southern music tradition for the boozy, hedonistic closer “Sweet Home.” However, when he takes his foot off the gas pedal, he offers up compelling moments such as the erotic “Tuition,” the evocative “Tiramisu,” and the sacrilegious “Rosary.” Yet even as Toliver careens forward with no shortage of flash and finesse, he runs up against thoughts of doubt and longing, evident on moody trap ballads like “Long Way to Calabasas” and the wistful “TMU.” But these complicated predicaments just come with the territory of the audacious lifestyle he so freely sing-raps about, one he stays more or less unapologetic over on “Pleasure’s Mine” and the decidedly more self-aware “All the Signs.”