Beautiful Thugger Girls received acclaim from critics, debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200, and at number four on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.
Background
On April 26, 2017, Young Thug originally announced that the project would be titled E.B.B.T.G., an abbreviation for Easy Breezy Beautiful Thugger Girls, which was a play on "easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl" as the slogan for CoverGirl.[1] After several delays, the release date was hinted a week before release and officially confirmed two days before release.[2][3][4]Beautiful Thugger Girls was described by Young Thug as a "singing album", which includes crossovers to musical genres such as R&B, dancehall and country.[5][6][7] Although it has been referred to as an album by Young Thug, 300 Entertainment have reported it as a commercial mixtape.[8]
Beautiful Thugger Girls was met with widespread critical acclaim.[21][10] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the mixtape received an average score of 84, based on eight reviews.[10] Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 7.8 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus.[9]
Paul Thompson of Pitchfork labelled Beautiful Thugger Girls Young Thug's "most compelling experiment in pop", saying it "strips away all the clutter, leaving his best-developed melodies and most evocative songwriting to date" while comparing it to Lil Wayne's Rebirth.[14] Scott Glaysher of XXL said, "Thug sounds the best he's ever sounded, despite some of the songs begin [sic] fairly far removed from his proverbial comfort zone".[20] Daniel Bromfield of Pretty Much Amazing argued "Young Thug cycles through a lot of styles here: lovebird R&B, sensitive acoustic folk, even country. But he doesn't terraform them to his whims so much as try them on for size".[16] Judnick Maynard of The Fader commented that Beautiful Thugger Girls "becomes more than a country album: the music isn't his master, instead he bends it to his will", and is a "testament to Young Thug's constantly evolving creative reach".[22]Tiny Mix Tapes's Corrigan B stated: "Beautiful Thugger Girls is remarkable because of its Thugger-ness" but noted that "Beautiful Thugger Girls marks the point at which his pure lyricism, absent an unimpeachable sense of melody and flow, has begun to detract from the project as a whole."[17]
The A.V. Club's Renatio Pagnani stated: "Few artists manage to balance wide-eyed eroticism with genuine warmth, and fewer manage the feat while packing multiple albums' worth of hooks into each song. For Thug, it's just his default mode."[11] Winston Cook-Wilson of Spin said, "The album feels unprecedented within his catalog because it strikes a balance Thug has never quite pulled off on a single project: mixing a unified, album-wide sound with moments of aggressive experimentation and nagging hooks".[23]Exclaim! critic Anya Zoledziowski thought that "Beautiful Thugger Girls—which lists Drake as executive producer—pushes the boundaries of Atlanta hip-hop while adding yet another groundbreaking project to the trapper's discography".[13]
Robert Christgau was less impressed in his column for Vice. While highlighting "Take Care" and "Family Don't Matter", he summarized the mixtape as "singsong porn from a purple people eater who's seldom as funny as he used to be and sometimes funnier than he wants to be".[19]
Year-end lists
Select year-end rankings of Beautiful Thugger Girls
^"Young Thug ひ on Twitter: "16th". June 9, 2017. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017. Retrieved June 16, 2017 – via Twitter.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
