Beautiful Thugger Girls

Maybe Young Thug is supposed to be caught in a loop, arguing with Lyor Cohen over his recording habits and whether he has to sit politely next to Jimmy Fallon twice a year. Since “Stoner” hit in 2014, Thug has seemed like an ascendent star. But aside from “Best Friend,” which yielded him a Platinum plaque, and “Pick Up the Phone,” which might have been lifted out from under him anyway, Thug has yet to truly break through to the A-list. His only entries into the Top 40 have been the Rich Gang single “Lifestyle” and guest spots on Usher and Rae Sremmurd songs. His three records from 2016 all got kind, if muted, receptions and generally failed to move the chains much at all. For all the breathless adulation, the last eighteen months of Thug’s career have been like Groundhog Day for people to whom Travis Scott owes royalties.

Beautiful Thugger Girls, released with little ceremony last Friday, wouldn’t appear at first glance to be the blockbuster that can change all of this. It came out the same day as 2 Chainz’s album, and Future’s HNDRXX, which is Thugger Girls’ closest recent analogue, has mostly vanished from the zeitgeist, unless a new summer single reveals itself. Nevertheless, this is Thug’s clearest step forward since 2015’s Barter 6, and perhaps his most compelling experiment in pop.

As far back as his formative I Came From Nothing mixtapes, Thug’s music has bent toward chaos, even formlessness. What made Barter 6 so surprising to longtime fans and newcomers alike was how precise and restrained it was. Thugger Girls has all of that record’s control, but swaps out the subtlety for bleeding declarations of love and fidelity. The emotional stakes here seem impossibly high. It also applies the type of focus used on last year’s JEFFERY, where each song aimed to embody the voice of a titular influence. Instead of loosely connected, compelling fragments, each track was self-contained and had a distinct tone. That naming device is gone, but more often than not, the cuts on Thugger Girls work as single-song exercises.

Though it’s been referred to by Thug himself as his “singing album,” Thugger Girls is not a radical departure for him, stylistically speaking. As with most of his material between Barter 6 and now, the question seems to be less what Thug is writing and recording at the given time and more what he’s decided to curate from the archives. Some of these songs date back to 2015 and have been teased on Snapchat and Instagram for nearly as long, and almost all of them have prototypes from earlier in his career.

But these songs are more developed, even when “developed” means reduced to the core elements. The climax of Thugger Girls comes with Thug staring at a screen “masturbating to your nudes” and by the time you get to that moment on the record, it seems like the only possible conclusion. Rather than dress up his basest, most deeply-felt emotions, Thug lays himself out in the rawest form possible. But just as Barter 6 succeeded by paring Thug down to his most minimal, Thugger Girls strips away all the clutter, leaving his best-developed melodies and most evocative songwriting to date.

The clarity doesn’t come right away. The opening tracks, “Family Don’t Matter” and “Tomorrow Til Infinity” play like a brooding, half-sober prelude. Thugger Girls really opens up on its third song, “She Wanna Party,” an exuberant cut co-produced by Rex Kudo, the architect of Post Malone’s “White Iverson.” Where “Iverson” was washed out and wistful, “Party” is unrestrained joy. The same could be said about “Do U Love Me,” where Thug dangles Benzes and Rolexes and hundred-dollar bills, but reserves most of his excitement for his clipped, repeated pleas: “Do you love me?”

Those two songs are split by “Daddy’s Birthday,” a co-production by London On Da Track and the somehow still-producing Scott Storch. Thug pauses for a beat and considers the toll of his career: “I’m so busy, make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.” This is an underrated aspect of Thug’s songwriting—whether he’s adhering to a bigger concept or mumbling an aside, he goes for compact, declarative phrases that carry all the emotional weight for him. (From Rich Gang’s “Freestyle”: “I ain’t never been in love, I don’t know how pain feels.”) When he says, on “For Y’all,” “I didn’t write this song, I just went right in,” it’s difficult not to take him at his word.

If the A-side feels like a bachelor party planned by Sun Ra, the B-side is more minimal. “On Fire” and “Get High” are tightly wound, the latter blessed by a superb Snoop Dogg verse where he deploys a handful of different flows and calls Young Thug “cuz.” “Me or Us” and “You Said” are what Rebirth could have been if Rebirth wasn’t Rebirth. And “Oh Yeah” sounds like a futuristic funeral dirge; at one point Thug says he’s “drunk off your love, and I just stood by the sink.” We’re used to seeing Thug in motion: leaving thousands of dollars in taxis, crudely repurposing limousine curtains, L-E-A-N-I-N-G. Seeing him rendered inert is entirely new.

But speaking of Future, the elder Atlantan’s appearance on Thugger Girls might go the furthest in clarifying the headliner’s intent. On the hook for “Relationship,” Future says he’s “in a relationship with all my bitches,” which is more or less the conceit of the song, something each rapper can agree on. But Future, who’s eight years older than Thug, quickly adds a second thought: “I need to cut some of ‘em off, I need help.” This has been the thrust of his music for a while now, the drive toward hedonism and the emptiness it leaves you with. Thug’s not there yet; he’s peeling off gleefully mischievous lines like “I got your bitch in a backpack.”

While he does pledge his undying love to his long-time girlfriend over and over again (and has throughout his catalog), at many moments on this record, Thug really does seem capable of being in a relationship with all of those women at once. Beautiful Thugger Girls is a twenty-something bouncing from club to yacht to attic and back again, feeling everything as deeply and as nakedly as possible along the way. These feelings, more often than not, are distinctly ephemeral, where time extends as far back as the Uber to the club and as far ahead as the Uber home. Unfiltered urges (“Fuck me, suck me”) rub right up against grand gestures (“Fall deep in love, love, love with me”). There’s little of Future’s jadedness. If in the past Thug has made everyday experiences seem chaotic and formless, his achievement here is distilling the murky waters of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop.