Getting Your Throws Straight: A Practical Guide
Young Throwing Like A Girl is the title track off Young Thug's 2016 project Jeffery. It's a short, two-and-a-half-minute banger that became one of his more viral moments. The song samples Adele's "Hello" but flips it into something much more chaotic and signature to Thug's flow. If you're looking to understand the track, reference it in a project, or just figure out why it hits the way it does, here's what you actually need to know. The song runs approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It opens with a pitched-down vocal sample that loops throughout, creating this sluggish, warped feeling. Thug comes in with rapid triplets over the beat, switching flows mid-bar without warning. The production is minimal — basically just the Adele sample, some 808s, and hi-hat rolls that come in bursts rather than steadily. What makes this track interesting from a technical standpoint is how Thug uses space. He'll lay out for four bars, letting the sample breathe, then sprint through twelve bars of dense syllable stacking. It's not effortless-sounding on purpose. The breathlessness is part of the delivery. I spent a good hour trying to transcribe the verse one time and ended up just accepting that some of his consonants are more suggestion than articulation. That's not a flaw in the recording, it's a feature of his aesthetic.
Where to Find the Song
The track is available on all major streaming platforms. You can find it on Jeffery, which was released independently through 300 Entertainment and Atlantic Records in February 2016. It's also included in various Young Thug compilations and playlists on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. If you're looking for a direct download, I'd recommend purchasing from iTunes orBandcamp if available — streaming compression eats away at the low end of this mix, and the 808 hits differently on lossless. The song peaked at around number 70-80 on the Billboard Hot 100 during its chart run, though it consistently shows up in Year-End lists for hip-hop tracks. It never got a massive music video push, which surprised a lot of people at the time. The visual accompaniment was pretty minimal — mostly just Thug in a studio setting or performing live snippets.
Production Notes and Common Pitfalls
If you're trying to use this track for anything — a montage, a TikTok edit, a podcast intro — there are a few things to watch out for. The Adele sample means you'll need clearance from both the master recording side and the publishing side if you're doing anything commercial. The original "Hello" writers (Adele, Greg Kurstin, etc.) still hold publishing, and 300/Atlantic hold the master. For personal use, obviously nobody cares. For anything you plan to monetize, budget somewhere between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for sync licensing depending on your distribution scale. A common mistake people make is pitching the track down further or speeding it up to fit a tighter edit window. The original mix is already heavily saturated in the low-mids. Shift it by more than a semitone and the vocal layer disappears into the mud. I learned this the hard way when I tried to chop it for a gym edit and ended up with something that sounded like a drowning radio. Keep it within two semitones of the original key if you're remixing.
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Why This Track Matters
Young Throwing Like A Girl sits in this weird pocket of Thug's discography where he was pivoting between his mixtape era and the more polished album approach he'd take on Beautiful Thugger Girls. The song works because it doesn't try to be either. It's raw, the sample choice is cheeky without being ironic, and the flow switches demonstrate a level of rhythmic control that casual listeners probably don't notice on first pass. The Adele interpolation was controversial at the time. Some critics called it lazy. Others called it brilliant contextual reclamation. The truth is somewhere in between — Thug wasn't trying to reinvent pop structure, he was using a globally recognized melody as a launchpad for something completely different. That's been his move repeatedly across his catalog. It's not always successful, but when it lands, it lands hard. This one landed. If you're new to Young Thug and this is your first deep dive, start here and then go listen to "Hot" and "Open Water" back to back. That'll give you a sense of his range before he started leaning harder into melodic singing. Throwing Like A Girl shows the rapper side of him operating at peak efficiency.
