Young Thug prides himself on being out of the ordinary—not just in sound and style, but in vision and action, too. He’s constantly searching for talismans that represent this commitment to the extraordinary, as his flows get more and more alien. Like Napoleon Dynamite before him, Young Thug sees a liger, the hybrid of a male lion and a female tiger, as a metaphor for the mysterious, or more literally being of a rare breed. “Liger,” from his new EP with the producer Carnage, Young Martha, is Thug relishing in his rarity, in both word and deed. “Everybody got tigers, so I wanna go get a liger,” he raps, enthusiastically. “I’m so different from these niggas, I won’t be like ’em (swear to God).”

There can be a chameleonic quality to Thug’s raps; they shift to blend into any environment, and they have a way of maximizing space. On “Liger,” Carnage’s leisurely production demands slower, more deliberate flows, and Thug obliges at first with a verse that builds to pitchy, half-squealed bars, each stanza carefully measured and crescendoing. But the second verse is a stunning change-up: Thug punches with emphasis every few syllables, each phrase snowballing for impact. As Carnage brings the glowing church organ, Thug continues to find illustrative new ways to articulate classic rap concepts (“Cash talk, baby, I want acres all in Vegas/I got bitches wanna fuck me all around the equator”). This is among the greatest displays of his effortless versatility. “Liger” is the latest in a long line of captivating Young Thug curios.