The mixtape features guest appearances from Travis Scott, Gucci Mane, Gunna, Quavo, Offset, and Wyclef Jean.
[7] With the exception of "Pick Up the Phone", each track was named after one of Young Thug's idols, including Gucci Mane ("Guwop"), Wyclef Jean ("Wyclef Jean"), Rihanna ("RiRi"), Future ("Future Swag"), Harambe, the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016, and Kanye West ("Kanye West").
[9] It features Young Thug ad-libbing and crooning sexual boasts over a half-time reggae beat[10] produced by TM88 and Supah Mario.
[12] Scott Glaysher of XXL magazine wrote that the beat had "a distinct Caribbean vibe", and felt that it sounded like something Wyclef Jean himself could rap over.
[21] The song has an unconventional ambient trap beat, with The Guardian's Lanre Bakare comparing it to the style of producer Suicideyear.
[9] Young Thug's raspy,[22] guttural[25] vocal performance on the song drew comparisons to Harambe[9] as well as singer Louis Armstrong.
[10] The beat, which was produced by Billboard Hitmakers,[28] was described by Bakare as sounding like it samples Kanye West's song "Real Friends" (2016).
During a meeting in New York with Julie Anne Quay, the founder of the fashion platform VFiles, Young Thug was shown the dress, and immediately decided to use it for Jeffery's cover art.
[33] In the Pitchfork review of Jeffery, Sheldon Pearce wrote that "the cover exhibits some of Thug’s strongest artistic traits: His eye for composition and stylishness, and his knack for testing limits and hurdling norms.
"[35] The song "Kanye West" (originally titled "Elton" and then later "Pop Man") featuring Wyclef Jean, was released on August 19, 2016.
[3] The mixtape's lead single, "Pick Up the Phone" featuring American rappers Travis Scott and Quavo, was released on June 3, 2016,[37] the song peaked at number 43 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
[38] "Wyclef Jean" was sent to urban contemporary radio on January 24, 2017, as the mixtape's second single,[39] it peaked at number 87 on the Billboard Hot 100.
[18] 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 Tha Tour with Rich Gang".
[12] Rolling Stone's 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".
[27] 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".
[8] 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".
[43] 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".