Jeffery was announced on July 9, via Young Thug's Instagram, along with previews of new music. It was initially slated for release on August 16, coinciding with Young Thug's birthday, but was pushed back. The mixtape was accompanied by his decision to abandon the stage name Young Thug in favor of the new moniker No, My Name is Jeffery, or simply his birth name Jeffery. The change of stage name was announced by his manager Lyor Cohen in the preparation for the mixtape's release. According to Young Thug, "Jeffery is all about Jeffery. It ain't even about Young Thug. Ain't no Young Thug songs on there. The mixtape is a straight crossover." On Beats 1, he clarified that the name change was only for one week, unless the mixtape sold 100,000 copies. Each track was named after one of Young Thug's "idols", including Gucci Mane, Wyclef Jean, Rihanna, Future, and Harambe, the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016.
Artwork
The project artwork features Young Thug in an androgynous dress designed by Italian designer Alessandro Trincone, and was photographed by Garfield Lamond. The artwork went viral and prompted a wide range of responses on social media.
Release and commercial performance
The song "Kanye West" featuring Wyclef Jean, was released on August 19, 2016. The mixtape release was then preceded by a short album trailer released on August 23, which depicted Young Thug being interrogated about his name by the authorities. Jeffery debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200 and number five on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, with 37,000 album-equivalent units and sold 18,000 copies in its first week. This is Thug's third debut in the top 40 and his second in the top 10.
Critical reception
Jeffery was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the mixtape received an average score of 82, based on 11 reviews. Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 7.4 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus. Album of the Year assessed the critical consensus as 77 out of 100, based on 11 reviews. AllMusic's Neil Z. Yeung called the mixtape "thrilling and essential, one of the best rap releases of 2016," writing that "there's enough freshness here to make it his most exciting and mainstream release to date." Daniel Bromfield from Pretty Much Amazing described it as "a more satisfying major-label rap album than most mixtape-bred rappers ever make," asserting that "despite being more extreme in many ways than his prior work, Jeffery is his poppiest tape since 2014's with Rich Gang." PopMatters critic Brian Duricy stated that "as a collection of songs, it's his most realized set to date." Rolling Stones Jody Rosen stated that "it's Thug's own sound that predominates: the heroic howls, rasps, mumbles and wheezes of a man who is as captivating a vocalist as any in pop." For MTV News, Meaghan Garvey wrote that "Jeffery, like ATLiens 20 years prior, has that unqualifiable, absolute feeling of arrival," describing it as "irrepressible, bursting with uncannily memorable one-liners and dynamic experiments in flow and cadence over beats that, attached to a more easily marketable rapper, could be obvious radio hits." Pitchforks Sheldon Pearce described it as "rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc," stating that "Thug understands the modern pop song construction better than anyone: anything and everything can be a hook." Robert Christgau wrote in Vice that Young Thug "makes black comedy out of irrepressible sound," stating that "his hoohoos and melismas and blahs and mwas and frogcroaks and put-puts are the message." In a less enthusiastic review, Lanre Bakare of The Guardian described it as "a mixtape that features gems among run-of-the-mill trap fodder" while praising the single "Pick Up the Phone" as "an example of all the things Young Thug excels at coming together on one track."
