Octane Review

Toliver sings in a register that carries almost no information. The words are a vehicle for tone, the hooks arrive already half remembered, and on earlier records the trick ran out somewhere around track nine. Octane is the first time it survives a full album, mostly because the production stays busy enough to do the arguing: Mike Dean, Wheezy, Cardo, Bnyx and FnZ put real low end and real movement underneath him, and Travis Scott's fingerprints are everywhere without the record collapsing into a Cactus Jack compilation.

The guests are used properly. Yeat and Rema pull in opposite directions, Teezo Touchdown lightens a run that was getting heavy, and nobody overstays.

What it does not have is anything to say, and the lyric sheet is where the grade falls. Clash called it his most cohesive and consistent work, Pitchfork sat at 6.5, and both are describing the same album from different ends. It gave him his first number one with 162,000 units, of which only 31,000 were copies actually sold, which says plainly how this music is being consumed and how much of the chart position is a playlist rather than a purchase.