The thing about mythmaking is, it’s a lot cooler when other people do it for you. Except for maybe when it’s a state attorney aiming to send you to prison until Barron Trump’s re-elected president. Staring into the judge’s eyes during Young Thug’s RICO trial a few years ago, a Georgia state prosecutor was doing just that as he told a fantastical tale of Thugger’s crime boss alter ego. It was an opening statement fit for Spike Lee’s The Slimefather starring Denzel Washington: “This is the most of them. This is the one that you see the shadow in the back of the room. He’s the one directing traffic. He is the one that we’re all afraid of. He’s the one that’s King Slime.”

Of course, as soon as Thugger beat the case, it was inevitable that he used it as the opener for his first post-jail LP. It’s just a shame the project is too sterile to make the most of the cinematic intro. While there’s a refreshing amount of pathos, UY Scuti is a bloated, unimaginative LP that will only make you dust off your Jeffery vinyl and long for the Obama era — a comeback that will make you wonder if prime Thugger can ever really come back.

At one hour and 18 minutes, Thugger’s latest is a collision of rote street raps and a few too obvious stabs at virality. Powered by jumpy trap synths, triumphant horns, and some forceful bars, the rap portion of “Ninja” begins solidly enough. Unfortunately, the hard-r flurry at the end of the second verse is the same kind of clumsy, fake-eccentric ragebait as his white-washed album cover. I laughed at it while I was taking my daily fatalism break. I cringed when I imagined rich white kids shouting it at Coachella next year.

Slightly more successful is “Whoopty Doo.” There’s a chance it was an opportunistic recording after his “whoopty doo” viral moment a few weeks ago. But Wheezy’s chic alien soundscape is the sound of poolside mansion luxury, and the chorus is playful enough for it to warrant a few repeats. Ditto for the Ken Carson-featuring “Yuck.” The vintage gothic trap beat still hits and the refrain is silly enough to be infectious. The only downside is that it’s never a good thing when Ken Carson washes you on your own song. Or anywhere.

But even among semi-free associative melodic rappers, bars were never really the point for Young Thug. It was always the soaring vocal eccentricity. Tracks like “Digits” became legendary because of his effortless quirks and pitched-up squealing that served as an unwieldy instrument for careening melodies. After So Much Fun and maybe Punk, Thugger’s music has generally lacked that singular unpredictability, and gone are the phonetic thrills of tracks like “Lifestyle.” You can feel that absence even more so without Gunna to help fill the gaps. When his girlfriend Mariah The Scientist jumps on wax to fill the void, we’re left with indistinct fodder for Thuggin’ love. Just throw on “Feel It” after listening to “Invest Into You.” The latter tells you about wounded love. With its slurred, yelping melodies, “Feel It” makes you … feel it. For big swaths of Uy Scuti, you don’t really feel anything. And some of that is because of a less inventive performance approach.

There was a time, between about 2013 and 2019, in which Young Thug rearranged cadences and syllables into a perfectly narcotized playhouse for trap lore and whimsy. Experimentation of that sort is missing here. That, combined with his general lack of incisiveness as a writer, help make this album feel like a collection of C-sides. It’s really a story of juxtaposition. UY Scuti’s “Pardon My Back” with Lil Baby versus So Much Fun’s “Bad Bad Bad” with Lil Baby. The serviceable “Yuck” with Ken Carson versus So Much Fun’s “Ski” with Gunna. The UY Scuti collabs just lack the fun; there’s nothing here that’s as electric as saying, “Bad, bad, bad,” a little too loudly to yourself while riding the E Train. The guest spots here mostly do their part — 21 Savage is sharp on “Walk Down” (which is, unfortunately, a worse version of his Metro Boomin Heroes & Villains collab of nearly the same name), while Cardi B’s searing confessional on “On The News” is an album highlight — so the lack of juice can be mostly attributed to the lead artist.

The LP’s best moments come through when Thugger lets his emotional turmoil ring out with unusual lucidity. Though this fact has been lost in a sea of memes and leaked jail calls we all should never have had access to, Young Thug has been recovering from a two-year jail stay for a case in which he was found not guilty. Gunna aside, he is the victim of unambiguous betrayal, and he’s lost time he can’t recover. That pain and frustration play out most clearly on “Miss My Dogs,” which almost feels like a sequel to Meek’s Mill’s Thugger-assisted single “We Ball.” While parts of it scan as very self-centered — at one point, Thug tells Future that if his dead friend, Young Scooter, were still alive, he’d tell him to patch things up — the raw emotionality fuses with his melodies in an authentic, potent way. Despite its sprawling length, with seven verses over seven minutes, the song exhibits a decisiveness that’s lacking elsewhere on UY Scuti, an album filled with lesser versions of previous creative peaks. The LP’s nearly 80 minutes can feel like a scattered attempt at living up to the myth instead of embodying the experimentation that made us create it in the first place.

COLD AS ICE

ROAST ME

Disney’s The Wizard and the Youngboy, Scene 1 and Scene 2 pic.twitter.com/rZ2c1pBnN5

— pellz (@Pellz_) September 25, 2025