The most exciting and maybe puzzling thing about Thug’s ascendant popularity is that he has consistently proven himself to be more aware of and interested in probing the sonic possibilities of present-day Atlanta rap than any of his peers. His sound is partly an exaggerated outgrowth of the insistence on new styles that has always been a part of Atlanta rap, of novelty taken to a logical extreme. But it’s also a product of his early fandom of Lil Wayne, whom he credits with teaching him to love words, to love maneuvering and manipulating them. “That’s my idol,” he says of Wayne. “Everything he do.” The influence is most obvious on Thug’s first mixtape, I Came from Nothing: there’s that familiar, nasal intonation on the vowels, softening and widening words so that, for example, “y’all” sounds like “yeow.”

Over the course of the tapes that followed—two I Came from Nothing sequels and last year’s 1017 Thug, his first tape with Gucci Mane’s 1017 Brick Squad collective—the Wayne influence receded as he developed his own, personal approach: vivid, brassy and joyful, more melodic than lyrical. Thug and his generation, the children of Beats by the Pound and “Bombs Over Baghdad,” have lived through rich and strange eras in Southern hip-hop. His songs often sound like dub versions of the ones he grew up on, propped up on the same goofy synth flutes and ringtone harmonies and trap-kit orchestra stabs. His voices (he has several) are what you remember, though: he cuts through the chaos, corkscrewing, raving and drifting in and out of Auto-Tune with robotic R&B turns that, like Future’s, defy the conventional line about the technology’s inhuman coldness. Individual phrases take on a kind of weird resonance independent of their contexts. Lines like, I’m so cold in Siberia (from “Nigeria”) and A hundred black choppers like a fuckin’ night (from “2 Cups Stuffed”) are raw material for his voice to reshape, and he makes sure you notice them, whether they are part of a larger story or not. He’s been accused of lyrical incoherence, but doesn’t especially mind. “I love when people ask me what I’m saying,” he says, “even though I ain’t gonna tell them. I’ll let them listen 10 more years before I tell them.”

Thug’s reputation for bizarre or inexplicable lyrics isn’t entirely merited. His songs are peppered with autobiographical and personally meaningful ephemera. The most widely quoted line in his recent hit, “Stoner,” for example, is its apparent non sequitur of a refrain, in which he repeats, I feel like Fabo in increasingly desperate cadences. To Thug, who still remembers sneaking into Bankhead’s Club Crucial as a kid to see the iconic Atlanta rapper Fabo with his group D4L, the sentiment is real. It’s about ambition, what it feels like and how confusing it can be. “Damn, I used to want to be like D4L,” he says. “Everybody who rapped, I wanted to be like. Pretty sure I don’t want to be like them now, though.” And then there are songs like “RIP,” from his first tape, a seeming map of his emotional life for the previous 10 years, including references to his brother Bennie, who was shot and killed in front of their home in 2000; his brother Unfunk, currently in prison (Thug pays for his legal fees); and his mom, Big Duck. I lost three people in three years, he raps, but to Big Duck it feels like seconds, later telling her, I love you, I love you, I love you. Thug was one of 11 children growing up, all of whom lived together, so the responsibilities of family are regular sources of motivation and frustration.