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Don Toliver’s ‘E85’ Video Turns a Police Chase Into a Kali Uchis Helicopter Escape
Don Toliver's new 'E85' video stages a police chase, a jailhouse scuffle and a Kali Uchis helicopter rescue.
Don Toliver has kept “E85” in the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40 since January, and now the Octane opener has a video that turns its momentum into something much more chaotic. Released Wednesday, May 13, after he first teased the clip at the end of his Rolling Loud Orlando set, the visual finds Toliver in a high-speed chase that escalates fast.
Directed by Shadrinsky, the video opens with Toliver barreling down the highway in a Porsche 918 while a line of police cars closes in behind him, the kind of pursuit that plays like a video game fantasy pushed into live action. He’s eventually hauled into custody, and from there the clip shifts into a more claustrophobic stretch inside the station, with much of it framed from an officer’s bodycam perspective. The pressure keeps building until Toliver gets into a scuffle, ends up with one of the officers’ guns, and breaks for the rooftop.
That’s where Kali Uchis enters. Toliver’s real-life partner arrives in a helicopter and pulls off the extraction, with Toliver hanging from the skids as the escape lands its final beat. It is less a clean getaway than a spectacle, but that fits the whole thing. The video leans hard into action-movie excess without losing sight of the fact that this is, at root, a rollout for a song that has already proved durable on the charts.
“E85” is currently No. 35 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100, and it has stayed inside the top 40 since its January release. Fans had already begun speculating on Friday, May 8, after footage from the visual circulated online and made it seem as though the 31-year-old might actually have been detained by police in Florida. Toliver ended that rumor cycle himself when he used parts of the music video to close out his headlining Rolling Loud Orlando performance later that night.
The timing also places the video squarely in the middle of a busy run for Toliver. He is on the Octane Tour, which stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Tuesday night, May 12, and is set to bring him back home to Houston for a show at the Toyota Center on Thursday, May 14. Octane arrived in January and gave him his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, moving 162,000 total album-equivalent units in its opening week, according to Luminate.
