Around Me

Around Me: Metro Boomin and Don Toliver in the Atmosphere

When Heroes & Villains arrived in December 2022, it didn't just arrive as an album; it arrived as a constructed world. Metro Boomin had assembled something with the internal logic and emotional coherence of a film soundtrack, and "Around Me" featuring Don Toliver was one of its most atmospheric corners. The collaboration made a certain intuitive sense from the beginning: Toliver's spacey, melodic delivery and Metro's environmental production share an aesthetic sensibility built for depth over immediacy.

Metro Boomin in His Auteur Phase

By the end of 2022, Metro Boomin was operating with a creative authority that few producers in rap history had commanded. The Atlanta producer had helped shape the sound of trap music across the better part of a decade, working with virtually every major voice in the genre, from Future to Drake to 21 Savage, and accumulating a discography that functioned as a kind of annotated history of contemporary trap. Heroes & Villains was his statement that the producer could be the main event rather than the supporting architecture. "Around Me" demonstrates that ambition clearly: the song prioritizes mood over velocity, texture over bombast, and the result is something that lingers in the memory rather than simply detonating and dissolving.

Don Toliver and the Art of Melodic Drift

Don Toliver had been one of the more interesting figures in the post-Travis Scott Houston rap landscape since his scene-stealing appearance on Astroworld and his subsequent solo projects. His approach to melody is deliberately unmoored from conventional pop structure: pitches bend away from expected landing points, rhythms float against the beat rather than landing squarely on it, and the emotional register stays consistently hazy in ways that reward attentive listening over multiple plays. On "Around Me," that style fits the production's expansive, enveloping quality with a precision that sounds effortless and almost certainly wasn't.

The Chart Numbers

"Around Me" debuted at number 53 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 17, 2022, which was also its peak, spending two weeks on the chart. The song accumulated over 31 million YouTube views, a figure that reflects the significant combined audience of both artists and the cultural weight of the album it appeared on. The brief chart run is consistent with the song's character: atmospheric rather than single-oriented, built for album listening rather than radio repetition, the kind of track that rewards context more than it rewards isolation.

Sound Design as Genuine Collaboration

What "Around Me" ultimately demonstrates is the productive tension between a producer's vision and a vocalist's instincts. Metro creates environments; Toliver inhabits them with his specific kind of haunted ease. The song has the quality of genuine artistic conversation rather than hired collaboration: neither artist is simply providing a service to the other, and both are building something together that neither would have arrived at independently. That distinction is audible, even if it's hard to articulate precisely where the difference lives.

A Room Within an Album

Within the architecture of Heroes & Villains, "Around Me" functions as a specific kind of interior space: quieter than the album's more aggressive tracks, more reflective, the kind of room you find in an otherwise loud building. Albums that work as unified experiences need those spaces, and this one earns its place in the sequence. It makes the tracks around it hit harder by providing contrast, and it rewards the listener who sits inside it for its full duration rather than skipping ahead to the next eruption.

The song also serves as a useful reminder that albums work as systems, not just collections of individual tracks. "Around Me" earns its place in Heroes & Villains not by competing with the album's more aggressive material but by providing the contrast that makes those tracks hit harder. Its atmospheric restraint is a structural contribution as much as it is a musical one, and albums that understand that kind of pacing are the ones that reward repeated listens across months rather than exhausting themselves in a single session.

Let it wash over you at the right time of night.

“Around Me” — Metro Boomin Featuring Don Toliver's singular moment on the 2020s charts.