Another disciplined retail project, a couple more singles, and a few more high-profile features would give him a fighting chance at a crossover hit album on the level of his ATL peer Future’s chart-topping Dirty Sprite 2. Additionally, more focused projects from Thug will afford him real opportunities to be a bigger star, if he’s interested in going there on those terms. One would like to feel like we are getting a more unadulterated taste of the Thug-of-the-moment. These tapes are peppered with relationships which seem to be increasingly less important to him: Rich Homie Quan and Birdman, specifically. Hopefully, at this point, we are done catching up with Thug’s backlog. It is a true shame, though, that “My racks are lettuce, my kush is onions” didn’t make it onto the Rich Gang album. “Beast” - which sounds definitely improvised, though brushed up from the leaked version - features flows and lines which would form the architecture for Barter’s “Constantly Hating,” and the Birdman-featuring “No No No” is a sister track to Rich Gang highlight “Flava”. One of these is the yelp-anchored “Phoenix,” which varies a chorus that is essentially a yelp with Thug’s fastest and most pronounced rapping of the tape and some typical show-stopping metaphors: “Mush it not beat it (?)/Hakuna Matata, I need it/I’m a Mufasa genius/Baby, come fuck for no reason.” Then there are tracks like the hazy electric guitar-backed “Hey, I,” the upbeat, Cali-tinged “I Tell You What” and the lithe, better-than-Migos trap of “Pull Up on a Kid” which feel like they could have been proper growers of singles.ĭetritus crops up towards the end of the tape, with a few tracks which sound like Thug mixing paint for Barter 6 and Rich Gang tracks. Some of the best moments, also, sound half-finished. They provide Thug with an appropriately uncluttered canvas the heavier-duty, less conducive beats that kicked off the first Slime Season are nowhere to be found. Producers - especially Wheezy, the tape’s star - keep the beats muted, gutted, smooth, and harmonically irresolute. There’s more of a curatorial stamp than last month’s Slime Season - namely, from longtime Thugger executive producer and engineer Alex Tumay. The roster of producers is like a veritable batting order of all-stars, from promising rookies like Wheezy, Ricky Racks, Goose, and newcomer Treasure Fingers to old reliables like Metro Boomin’. Slime Season 2 is definitely the stronger of the two projects, boasting more daring moments - evidence of Thug’s forward motion stylistically. These songs feel wrested from a huge variety of creative zones and time periods perhaps, from their most meaningful context. It confused some people by not packing a whole lot of obvious singles, but has a consistency of sonic vision that the Slime Season entries lack. April’s excellent Thug album Barter 6, in its relative subtlety and brevity, had a blinders-on sharpness of purpose. The leak certainly affected the form in which these came to us, as well as significant interference from Thug’s label: Lyor Cohen’s street-rap-focused 300 Records, with whom Thug seems to be periodically at odds. One wonders what it would have been like if the best of these songs had come out the way they were supposed to: on projects like the canned Metro Thuggin collab between Thug and his regular producer Metro Boomin’, or Slime Season in its original form - with all beats from his all-star street rap architect London on da Track. Together, Slime Season 1 and 2 serve like a remixed and well-curated version of the 50-plus-track, Young-Thug-only segment of the leak - other tracks came from Rich Homie Quan and Skooly - with newer material peppered throughout.
Many of these were leaked this past May to DJ haven and leak aggregator blog ATrilli. Mostly, they are collections largely pieced together from a backlog of a hundred-plus songs Thug has been accumulating since roughly 2013.
The two hour-plus Slime Season tapes are nothing if not dense.
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