Hypebeast Magazine
How Don Toliver Made One of 2026’s Most Infectious Albums
2026 is shaping up to be the year Don Toliver makes the jump from playlist MVP to something bigger than hip-hop. To put it in perspective, Hits Daily Double has him sitting among the year’s highest-selling albums alongside Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen, BTS, and Olivia Dean. Different genres. Different audiences. Same tier. Toliver isn’t just one of hip-hop’s most consistent hitmakers anymore. He’s breaking into the top of music, period.And streaming tells the same story. Spotify reports Octane has already crossed the 1 billion mark, his first project to do so. It’s hard to call this a fluke, or a flash-in-the-pan moment. “When I saw it go No. 1, I was happy, bro. But it kind of felt inevitable,” he told us in our cover story interview from Hypebeast Magazine Issue 37. “The way everything was c...
Don Toliver’s Love for Cars Didn’t Start With ‘Octane’
This post is in support of our Don Toliver cover story from Hypebeast Magazine #37: The Architects Issue. To order a copy, visit HBX.Don Toliver loves cars. That much is obvious. But with Octane, that obsession becomes something more deliberate, even a guiding ethos surging through the entire project’s DNA. The album itself plays like a pedal-smashing love letter to Group B rally racing and high-performance fuel. It even opens with “E85,” an ode to high-octane fuel blend used in flex-fuel vehicles. From the start, it’s clear: where 2024’s Hardstone Psycho saw the Houston musician building a full musical and visual world around motorcycle culture, Octane finds Toliver making music for the velocity and adrenaline rush of rallying racing.“I got infatuated with watching racers race and fans li...
