Young Thug

You don’t get a lot of warning for an artist like Young Thug. From his warped delivery to his radical, gender-fluid fashion sense, the Atlanta rapper (born Jeffery Lamar Williams in 1991) flies in the face of every unspoken rule for what hip-hop is. Starting with a prolific run of mixtapes in the early 2010s, Thug rose by pioneering a weird, ever-shifting flow somewhere between singing, rapping, mumbling and squawking. But the weirdest thing about what he does is that it works. Nearly every project Thug has released—from 2016’s reggae-inflected JEFFERY to the country-ish sides of 2017’s BEAUTIFUL THUGGER GIRLS—has cracked the mainstream, laying the groundwork for a new crop of fellow eccentrics like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Meanwhile, he has continued to push himself as an MC. “It seemed like a show,” Young Thug told Apple Music about making 2015’s Slime Season 2. “You gotta show up; everybody’s watchin’.” That dedication to sharpening his performances led to career-high reviews and sales for his debut 2019 studio album, So Much Fun, a sprawling, guest-stacked opus. Since then, he used his prized place at the top of the heap to experiment, blowing past genre boundaries on 2021’s Punk and commanding malleable collabs with Drake, Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott on 2023’s BUSINESS IS BUSINESS. Rather than search for some guiding internal logic in Young Thug’s music, it’s best to just take a deep breath and embrace the surprise factor.