Every half-decade or so, Justin Bieber sloughs off the callused skin of the pop superstar he became at age 15 to reveal the tender and quirky R&B singer he’s always been at heart. He did it in 2013 with his album “Journals,” then in 2020 with “Changes.”
Neither project did anything like the numbers of his shinier, smilier teen-idol stuff, though each seemed like a crucial reset for a guy battling the pressures of early onset celebrity. Now, at 31, he’s done it again with “Swag,” the surprise LP he dropped Thursday night just hours after revealing that it existed.
Like those earlier albums, the 21-track “Swag” comes after a period of change and tumult for Bieber: In 2022, citing the need to focus on his health, he called off a world tour behind the previous year’s “Justice” album; in 2023, he parted ways with his longtime manager, Scooter Braun; last year, he and his wife, Hailey Baldwin, had their first child together. (Somewhere in there he also sold the rights to his music catalog for a reported $200 million.) More recently, he’s been caught on video in a series of confrontations with paparazzi that got people talking about his well-being.
“It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business,” he tells a photographer in one clip that went viral last month — so viral, in fact, that Bieber excerpts it on “Swag,” which puts his luscious crooning over spacey, cooled-out grooves full of pillowy synths, twanging electric guitars and reverbed chillwave-’80s beats.
What distinguishes “Swag” from “Journals” and “Changes” is that this album feels much rawer and more improvisatory than the earlier ones; the production throughout is murky and smeared, and the record includes a couple of demo-like tracks that suggest Bieber simply AirDropped unfinished voice memos from his phone to whomever was sitting behind the computer in the recording studio. (One of them, a gorgeous little gospel-blues ditty, is titled “Glory Voice Memo.”) The idea that “Swag” puts across pretty sympathetically is that a messy life — let’s not forget that Bieber is also involved in a Christian organization that some have compared to a cult — yields messy music.
“When the money comes and the money goes / Only thing that’s left is the love we hold,” he sings in the thrumming “Butterflies,” which samples another of those paparazzi run-ins; “Walking Away,” a lightly psychedelic soul-rock jam, has him describing the challenges of his highly scrutinized marriage with an endearing frankness about his desire to wise up emotionally. (Braun, whom Bieber is said to have paid millions of dollars recently to settle an old debt, wrote on Instagram that “Swag” “is, without a doubt, the most authentically Justin Bieber album to date.”)
In un-polishing his music, the singer is also adapting to the scrappy and proudly idiosyncratic vibe of modern pop as found on records by the likes of SZA, Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey, even Drake — A-plus stars who’ve achieved domination in the streaming era not by honing a streamlined vision but by pursuing odd impulses and allowing the listener to feel like part of the journey. One of Bieber’s key collaborators here is Mk.gee, the mysterious guitar virtuoso whose 2024 debut made him perhaps the most talked-about musician’s musician of the last few years; “Swag” feels shaped by the way Mk.gee thinks about how a great pop song should balance novelty and familiarity. Other members of the creative team Bieber gathered for loose jam sessions at his home in Los Angeles include Dijon, a frequent partner of Mk.gee’s, and Carter Lang, who’s worked closely with SZA.
Given Bieber’s attentive nature and his good taste — think of his relatively ahead-of-the-curve participation in remixes of Wizkid’s “Essence” and “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee — it probably figures that in 2025 he’d make a record that imagines Phil Collins sitting in with Scritti Politti. Yet as a tinkerer luxuriating in rough edges, Bieber stands alone among his fellow white male pop stars (or at last the few of them who remain near the center of the conversation): Benson Boone is doing well-rehearsed back flips on every awards show stage that will have him, while Ed Sheeran has said his upcoming album represents a return to his old hit-seeking ways after a spell in the folky wilderness. And then there’s Morgan Wallen, whose thematically gloomy “I’m the Problem” is so sonically dialed in that you almost fear what the album’s enormous success will end up doing to the guy.
Does Bieber relish his outlier status? In one of several very cringe interludes on “Swag,” the internet comedian Druski tells the singer that, although his skin is white, his soul is Black — to which Bieber, clearly operating without the guidance of a strong manager, responds, “Thank you.” Still, you can’t argue with Druski’s assessment that he can “hear the soul” on this album: Bieber’s singing has never sounded more instinctual than in songs like the crunchy “Daisies” and the country-soul “Devotion,” and even when they’re bad, his lyrics have an awkward charm, as in “Go Baby,” in which he plugs the iPhone-case-slash-lip-gloss-holder sold by his wife’s beauty brand, and “405,” a song about flirting with Baldwin in the car that rhymes “Hit the gas” with “Spider-Man on your ass.”
Shaggy, disarming, often quite beautiful, the LP argues that swag is not something to be taught (as indeed Bieber once famously enlisted someone to do) — not a skill nor a technique to be perfected and deployed. It’s a state of mind, bro. Is that clocking to you?
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