Key Insights

• Winter Storm: A recent winter storm transformed New York City into a cold landscape.
• Album Release: Don Toliver’s album OCTANE is set to release in three days.
• Travis Scott Collaboration: Travis Scott contributed to OCTANE, maintaining his streak on Toliver’s albums.
• Career Milestone: OCTANE marks Toliver’s fifth album and is expected to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Mere days ago, a winter storm turned the Big Apple into an arctic tundra — but on this frigid late-January afternoon, Don Toliver has made the trek anyway to Manhattan’s famed Electric Lady Studios. After all, his album OCTANE arrives in three days, and he’s putting the finishing touches on it.

It’s toasty inside the state-of-the-art Greenwich Village studio, but Toliver is still bundled up in all-black attire, rocking a bonnet over his braids, a ski jacket, Coreshot pants and boots, all courtesy of Chinese designer Dingyun Zhang. “This room, you can smell it — it’s super iconic to me,” he says of the studio where so many classic albums, from Patti Smith’s Horses to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, were recorded. The woodsy scent of a teakwood-and-tobacco candle wafts through the air as an engineer noodles on a synthesizer in the background.

Toliver’s own work for OCTANE is done, but he’s saving room for one last guest spot from Travis Scott, who signed Toliver to his label Cactus Jack, in partnership with Atlantic Records, in 2018. “Dude pop out like Batman, smoke screen,” Toliver jokes. La Flame ultimately beats the buzzer, turning in his vocals at the 11th hour to continue his streak of being on every Toliver album. (His woozy appearance on OCTANE’s “Rosary,” which will soon hit No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100, has now drawn comparisons to his assist on SZA’s Grammy Award-nominated “Love Galore.”) “He’s the illest,” Scott later tells Billboard of Toliver.

In just a few days, OCTANE will help the 31-year-old born Caleb Zackery Toliver make the quantum leap to rap’s A-list. But today, the Houston native is even-keeled and humble. So far, Toliver’s career has been a steady labor of love: OCTANE is his fifth album in nearly six years — on top of his work on a pair of Cactus Jack Jackboys compilations — and like each of his albums so far, it will end up reaching the top 10 of the Billboard 200. Unlike his previous solo projects, it hits No. 1.

Read the full Don Toliver cover story here.