For the past few years, Young Thug has been one of music’s great agents of disruption and instinctive chaos, a streak that extends to this album’s fight-picking title. But Barter 6 isn’t the electric-yelp riot that we might’ve expected. Instead, it’s a deep-funk mood piece, the sound of a deeply talented rapper crawling into his own head and finding a new groove. What makes Thug matter isn’t what he says or what he wears. It’s the things he does with his voice: the counterintuitive melodies, the surprise pitch-changes, the alien syntax. And in that respect, Barter 6 is a master class. –Tom

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