There’s a line on Slime Language that sums up Young Thug’s appeal better than any music nerd essay ever could. On the heavenly “Oh Yeah”, the track floats like a cloud while Thugga buries deep in his verse, his voice rising slightly higher with each bar. And then he squeals, somehow both elegantly and desperately, “send me nudes when I’m on the rooooad”. It’s absurd, douchy, slightly embarrassing and weirdly, weirdly romantic. If you hated him before, you’ll still hate him. But if you love the rapper who once said he would change his name to ‘SEX’, you get a bunch of these gloriously oddball moments.

For someone with such a daunting catalogue of music it’s somewhat unsurprising that Slime Language feels very familiar. This isn’t Beautiful Thugger Girls. The production here is handled by the same villains – Wheezy turns up more than once to conjur a goopy trap  beat. The bass hits heavy and there are few surprises.

That’s a real shame because the album is infinitely better when it gets lighter and lighter until it feels like it might just vaporize. It’s a much more apt match for Thug too. He undoubtedly has his moments as an endlessly-creative trap rapper (“Armani the jeans, Gucci shirt on, colour my spleen”) and he has an almost-hilarious 2 Chainz-esque way of stringing unrelated bars together (“I know niggas gettin’ extorted like the common cold/I done ate cereal out a plate, I done ate cereal out a bowl”). A couple of other moments are pushed so far by Thugga that he forces them to work – try and get ‘Audemar, Audemar, Audemar’ out of your head. But he’s much more exciting when it feels like he’s straining himself.

That only happens when the beats get weird and watery. The aforementioned ‘Oh Yeah’ is a mile-high standout from the very weak first half of this album. ‘It’s A Slime’ is another, sounding a bit like a trap beat produced by Enya with Lil Uzi Vert proving to be a fitting compliment.

The back half of the album is much more creative and unsurprisingly a much more interesting listen. The four-track stretch of ‘Goin Up’, ‘January 1^st’, ‘Chains Choking Me’ and ‘STS’ is a purple patch – suddenly the producers decide to flex their muscles and throw a few curveballs at Thug. ‘January 1^st’ has those same trap drums but features a muffled high-pitched sample running through it and zooming, soft synths blips. Thug is appropriately vivid in his imagery (“I got diamonds on my toes motherfucker/I got diamonds on my nose”). ‘Chains Choking Me’ is even better, courtesy of well-timed volume switches on the beat to focus on Thug and a nutty, plucked guitar. None of the guests make a real impact, but they at least help give Thug a breather before he bursts in for another slithering verse.

But it’s Thug’s same unpredictable, stream-of-consciousness energy that still proves to be both his best and worst weapon. Young Thug albums often just feel like the best handful of tracks that he happens to have lying around at the time. There’s little rhyme or reason to this tracklist – it ends with the woeful ‘Slimed In’, which is mostly just the terrible Nechie (whoever that is). Sometimes, you wonder what might eventuate if he sat for a moment and thought about how to craft an actual album. But that’s not Jeffrey Williams. And we’ve probably seen enough of him now to know that it never will be.

6.2