Young Thug’s new album, Punk, opens softly and strangely. The acoustic, drumless “Die Slow” was recorded in a Venice hotel room two years ago; before Thug starts rapping in earnest, he notes people “riding past on boats” through the canals below. He goes on, in that ad-libbed intro, to wobble back and forth between pride and shame, reporting that he only consumed one pint of lean on his most recent tour, but that tour kept him from attending his son’s birthday. (Punk occasionally resembles 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls, and that birthday aside, in particular, recalls the line: “I’m so busy, it make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.”) “Die Slow” then gives way to a verse about his brother’s narrow escape from a life sentence and his mother’s brush with death—but that verse is interrupted only six bars in when Thug’s take unravels into an unstructured monologue about his parents’ breakup, a shooting, a hit-and-run, and what sounds like two different sheriff’s deputies.
The monologue is surprising and idiosyncratic in a way that Thug’s writing has seldom been in recent years. (The way he clears his throat before rushing through the detail “a deputy sheriff that my mom was fucking with” is both comic and a little pained.) The quality of his work never cratered—2019’s So Much Fun delivers on its title—but his lyrics have become less distinct, less singular, designer labels enjambed against violent threats in a playful, knowing way. This autopilot continues across much of Punk, Thug and his personal shoppers in suspended animation. What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.
Speaking of which, Punk’s title is a misnomer. Its guitars are often acoustic and almost uniformly gentle. When Thug grows meticulous, he burrows into those guitars. His rolling verse on “Recognize Real” (also drumless) retains both the glee that has always dotted his writing (“I told my teacher I’ma buy more watches ’cause I was tardy”) and his inimitable phrasing, like when he warns that he’s about to take over “like cancer.” On “Contagious,” he raps about swearing to a judge that he was “faking,” then breaks into a strange qualifier: “But I know it’s in my heart, and I feel it, baby.” And while “Yea Yea Yea” plays like a sketch, its disappearing-within-itself focus recalls some of Thug’s most celebrated experiments.
But there are too many songs on Punk. This has less to do with the actual length—it has enough ideas to justify its 63 minutes—than with the way its musical and emotional arcs are flattened, lost in inferior iterations of similar ideas. The notion to break up stretches of acoustic delicacy with more conventional rap beats is an interesting one, but too many songs from the latter group are rote, anonymous: “Droppin Jewels,” “Road Rage,” the tinny “Scoliosis.” The TV movie-climax gloss of “Insure My Wrist,” with its pianos and preening electric guitar, might work as a spot of catharsis were it not a diminished-returns retread of “Peepin Out the Window,” an excellent Future collaboration slotted four songs prior.
Sometimes Punk becomes more animated. “Rich Nigga Shit,” a duet with the late Juice WRLD, has both the album’s most sinister beat (from Pi’erre Bourne and Kanye West) and Thug squawking like a chicken during the chorus. “Bubbly,” which enlists Travis Scott and Drake for the album’s biggest commercial play, is just strange and dark enough to complicate playlists. Perhaps most fascinating is the Doja Cat collaboration “Icy Hot,” which sounds like what Thug’s fans and detractors both thought, in 2013, he might eventually do to pop radio: yank it up into a neon, near-falsetto haze. While Thug’s stylistic descendants (Gunna, Lil Baby, and so on) are at the forefront of pop rap, and while Thug remains very popular, his creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends. Punk suggests that the space he now occupies—one adjacent to but not precisely in rap’s center—is one that allows him more room to experiment.
At its worst, the album sounds like Watch the Throne if “We Are Young” really had been saved for it (Nate Ruess, Jeff Bhasker, and Gunna’s maudlin “Love You More”) or a campfire singalong at Arizona State (the A$AP Rocky- and Post Malone-assisted “Livin It Up”). But it comes to a close in a way that effectively reframes the subdued tone that dominates the album. “Day Before,” a Mac Miller duet so named because it was recorded one day before Miller died in September 2018, seems to be Punk’s acoustic big bang, the Pittsburgh rapper trading verses with Thug over a guitar and little else. It’s eerie and tremendously well-executed. Thug is vibrant and engaged; Miller is “swimming in the linen like the deep end.” But the title pulls the listener out of the song itself and asks them to consider death; what might have seemed, on the album’s A-side, like a soft malaise, now scans as wistful, even mournful. It sounds pretty, and like it’s barely there at all.
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