Don Toliver, the 28-year-old Houston rapper, is currently touring the country opening for Future, who has leveraged the grimmest corners of his own psyche to earn a spot on top of rap’s A-list. Future has taken the emerging star under his wing, imparting wisdom whenever he can. The most important piece of advice the mentor has had for his pupil?
Be aggressive.
“Future attacks the basket,” says Toliver. “That’s the biggest thing he’s taught me: to always attack the record.”
Toliver typically lets his dreads curtain his face, often to hide the piercing eyes. More recently though he’s been wearing his hair tied back, opting for eccentric sunglasses and vibrant, colorful fits. Which is to say, he’s dressing like a star. Since emerging in the late 2010s, Toliver, known for his expressive voice and omnivorous appetite for different production styles, has been trying to lean into that aggression. Casual music fans likely heard him first on “Lemonade,” the Internet Money single from 2020 that paired him with Nav and Gunna, both significantly bigger names than Toliver at that time. And yet—before either of those MCs has a chance to breathe on the record—Toliver steals the whole track out from under them, sliding from a silky, stoic bridge (the “xanny bars” and “college girls” don’t move him; they’re merely there) into a chorus that makes familiar tropes feel alien. “Lemonade” peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, but that barely captures the way it dominated rap radio for months on end. Toliver was inescapable.
Plenty of artists who have a viral moment or two fail to break through as enduring, major figures in music. But Toliver has some major co-signs. There’s Future, of course. And there’s Travis Scott, who saw something in Toliver and signed him to his Cactus Jack imprint.
On Toliver’s records, he’ll surprise you with his off-kilter phrasing and the oddball syllables he chooses to stress.” In conversation, Toliver mirrors this habit: he will twist pat phrases like “At this rate, whatever happens, happens” around until it sounds less like zen remove and more like the forecast of a coming storm. This idiosyncracy is something he developed after years of studying artists introduced to him by family members, and artists that he discovered on his own, online. But where some aspiring artists get stuck in a rut of imitation and homage, Toliver soon saw a way to distinguish himself. “When I got older,” he says, “I realized I had a voice of my own.”
Toliver has done all this by tweaking the formulas for modern rap and R&B in subtle but crucial ways. Everyone wants to work with him. Recently he anchored a single by Justin Bieber and appeared on critically acclaimed albums by SZA, Nas, Wizkid, Eminem, Baby Keem, and Drakeo the Ruler. That’s him all over the Metro Boomin LP and making Pusha-T’s vanguard drug raps palatable for a Gen-Z audience on “Scrape It Off.” “Moon,” his duet with Kid Cudi, was included on Kanye West’s Donda sans an appearance from West.
“I know how to do everything,” Toliver says. “ I can literally hear any beat and know how I should sound, or somebody else should sound.” It may sound like one hell of a boast. But to hear Love Sick, his phenomenally dense, digressive album from this February, is to learn he might actually be underselling that versatility. Love Sick is his announcement as a major artist, and one capable of bending disparate sounds into his orbit. The Blackstreet club edit of the Brent Faiyaz-featuring “Bus Stop” counterbalances “Honeymoon” and its irresistible slink; the classic R&B of the Charlie Wilson duet “If I Had” qualifies “Leave the Club” and its last-call sweatiness. The visuals find Toliver coming out of his shell, adopting a flared-pants, three-buttons open lothario character who wouldn’t be out of place in Wilson’s Gap Band. It’s Toliver leaning into the image projected by a guy who writes dirtbag lines with vivid specificity like “She be upset when I connive in my leather coat.”
That expansive view of musical possibility is coded into his DNA. Toliver’s father, who lived a few miles north of the working class West Houston neighborhood where he grew up, kept studio equipment upstairs, and actually made several appearances on records issued by Swishahouse, the independent label founded by Michael Watts and OG Ron C which became a launching pad, during the mid-2000s Houston rap crossover, to national fame for artists like Paul Wall, Slim Thug, Mike Jones, and Chamillionaire. While his grandparents introduced him to Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, and the Temptations, Toliver’s mom and dad nudged him into the contemporary musical landscape.
“My parents were hip to what was going on in the ‘90s and early 2000s,” he says. So it seemed natural when their son started experimenting, scribbling rhymes in his school notebooks and recording songs through the microphone on his PlayStation. In high school, he released “Bitch I’m in the Building,” over a Tyga instrumental ripped from YouTube.
In 2013, when Toliver was still a teenager, he formed a duo called Playa Familia with a friend who took the stage name YungJosh93. Together they wrote and recorded plenty of songs, but more crucially made themselves fixtures around Houston, playing whichever clubs and showcases they could. From there, Toliver met Dr. McDaniels, who DJs for him to this day. “He was a DJ in Houston but he did a lot of local club acts all over the city,” Toliver recalls. “We’d go club to club playing the record; I met a lot of DJs: strip club DJs, radio DJs. I played the nightlife with everybody, and that bubbled up to a relationship with management.” This led first to a partnership with Chedda Da Connect, the fellow Houston native who signed him to a joint venture between his We Run It Entertainment and Atlantic.
That maneuvering was crucial, and put Toliver on the path to where he is presently. But he knew early on that it would be a hollow exercise if the music he handed over on CDs and thumb drives wasn’t unique. “I couldn’t live with people saying I sounded like somebody else,” he says. “I think that if you want to be an artist who makes that type of impact straight off the bat, you have to be different.” So while he admired the way poised but tranquil rappers like Dom Kennedy carried themselves, he committed to the sort of unpredictability that would let him defy easy categorization. He hears the comparisons people continue to make; he’s unmoved. “People say I sound like Akon, or like T-Pain,” Toliver says. “But I feel like I sound like myself.”
Shortly after that first contract was signed, Toliver made contact with someone in Travis Scott’s circle. He’d been a fan of Travis’s music for a while; the deal he would soon sign with Cactus Jack formalized a relationship that Toliver characterizes as vital to his personal and professional development. It was under Travis’s wing that Toliver was introduced to the public at large, on Astroworld’s “Can’t Say.” His first two albums, Heaven or Hell and Life of a Don, were released in 2020 and ‘21, respectively, each charting well and spawning modest hits (“After Party,” “What You Need”).
“Being around somebody like that will make you want to be the best person you can possibly be,” Toliver says of Travis. “He motivated me to be the best version of myself.” In fact, in their collaborations, Travis even seems to nudge his style toward his protege’s; on Life of a Don’s “Flocky Flocky,” Travis’s second verse incorporates a lilt and bounce that are Toliver trademarks. He’s influencing his influences.
Now Toliver is at the center of the scene, fluent in the language of the moment—the popular themes, flows, beats—while scrambling his delivery to sound as fresh and urgent as ever. As the biggest stars of the previous era have recognized, Toliver is reimagining what’s right in front of us, seeing things that nobody else could. And when he has the opportunity to share that vision, he knows what to do: attack, attack, attack.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Charlotte Rutherford
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Yazmin Adams and Keenan Howard
Skin by Courtney Housner
Tailoring by Tatyana Sargsyan
Production design by Daniel Lane at Nucalifornia