Young Thug - Beautiful Thugger Girls - 2x LP Vinyl

Beautiful Thugger Girls is Thug’s clearest step forward since 2015’s Barter 6, and perhaps his most compelling experiment in pop. 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.

---