In 2007, back when YouTube was in its infancy and Justin Bieber was not far beyond his, he and his mother posted to the platform a series of videos of him singing covers. Mostly, he gave preternaturally tender versions of R&B hits — Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” Brian McKnight’s “Back at One,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (!) and more. (There is also 40 seconds of “Justin Bieber playing the djembe” for the curious.)
All of these videos remain on Bieber’s YouTube channel and the spirit captured in them has remained in his music, even if at times it has appeared to be shoved into the back seat and told to remain quiet while the adults were talking.
By the dawn of the 2010s, he was a pop phenom, and a couple of years after that, he was the most successful male pop star of his generation. The more successful he became, though, the more his connection to R&B was pared back. “Journals,” his 2013 EP of lo-fi soul, became a connoisseur’s favorite, but didn’t reorient his trip to the pop stratosphere. On his biggest hits — especially the 2015 pair “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean?” — his voice, and how it was filtered, was more eau de toilette than eau de parfum.
A decade has passed since then, and Bieber has spent long stretches of that time in a kind of public retreat. He’s had big hits, and he’s toured big rooms, and he’s been an object of tabloid scrutiny and public speculation about his mental health; largely, he’s been a superstar seeking a shadow.
“Swag,” Bieber’s seventh studio album, which was released with almost no advance notice last week, is a winning example of an older artist — though, at just 31, it feels lightly ludicrous to refer to Bieber this way — being willing to toss much of the old playbook away, or at least obscure it really well. It is an album of spacey, sometimes slithery soul music — some of it highly digitally manipulated, some of it refreshingly acoustic — that feels like a reversion to Bieber’s core passions refracted through the lens of a performer who has seen too much.
The low-pressure environment of this album is tactile — Bieber sings in a variety of modes, he collaborates with unexpected peers, he has standard-length songs and also snippets and skits.
But when Bieber finds common ground between his pop training and progressive ear, magic happens. “Daisies,” a collaboration with the guitar-pop radical Mk.gee, is urgent and approachably provocative. “All I Can Take,” with its hard-slap drums and sparking synths, the quiet storm revival “Go Baby” and the reverent and patient “Sweet Spot” all nod to the work that Maurice Starr and later Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis did with the crucial 1980s R&B boy band New Edition.
On the convincing and elegantly constructed “Yukon,” Bieber’s voice is heavily manipulated, but not in the dehumanizing way it once was; here he becomes a larger-than-life character of flirtatious excess. “I know you like to go slow, but we could go faster / Tell me the password,” he sings with a wink, in a cadence that could just as easily have come from Drake.
There is gospel hiding in Bieber’s R&B — he attempts a literal pass at it on “Glory Voice Memo,” a brief interlude that features his most ambitious singing (“I’ve been used, and I’ve been beaten down / I been let down and stalled out”). And the album closes with a benediction from Marvin Winans, of gospel’s Winans clan, singing “Forgiveness.”
But the real belief on this album is in commitment. Bieber has been married to his wife, Hailey, since 2018 and became a father last year. He has duty on his mind, though he sings about it as if it were a sensual act. On “Go Baby,” he references Hailey’s success in the cosmetics business: “That’s my baby, she’s iconic / iPhone case, lip gloss on it.” On “Walking Away,” he navigates a relationship experiencing some hiccups: “We’ve been testing our patience / I think we better off if we just take a breath / And remember what grace is.”
That sentiment recurs on the excellent, Prince-esque “Devotion,” one of the album’s highlights. That song features the soul experimentalist Dijon (a longtime Mk.gee collaborator), who sings as well as sharing writing and production credits. It includes some of Bieber’s simplest and most affecting singing, celebrating the virtues of love’s tiniest gestures: “I’d rather take the long way home / So we can laugh and sing a couple more songs.” (Much of the production and writing on “Swag” falls to Carter Lang, who has worked extensively with SZA, and Eddie Benjamin.)
A handful of rappers are invited to the party, though not all are quite sure how to contort themselves to handle these dreamy beats. (Though to be fair, none have ever rapped over Clams Casino instrumentals.) Gunna sounds a bit over-ethereal on “Way It Is,” and Sexyy Red sounds more patient in her erotic exultations than usual on “Sweet Spot.” Only Lil B, in chant mode on “Dadz Love,” and Cash Cobain, already a pop-minded abstract sensualist, on the album’s title track, truly stick the landing.
Most of the sturdiest music on “Swag” is on the first half; the second half is a scattershot amalgam mostly consisting of vocal demos with lyrics that feel incomplete, or at least understudied, and humor skits about Bieber’s relationship to Black culture, featuring the comedian Druski.
Those three interludes are an attempt at explaining something about how Bieber navigates the world, or perhaps how the world navigates Bieber. He presents himself as an object of study and a sponge of perception, a surprisingly passive approach to life for a person of his fame level. (At least he didn’t sample a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, as he did on his 2021 album “Justice.”)
Which isn’t to say that this music is an apology. If anything, it betrays a sly confidence that Bieber has often displayed in real life, but not always on record. It’s as if he’s unearthed something old and true about himself, and is thrilled to be playing with it again.
Even the album’s name, “Swag,” reverts to an early-2010s iteration of innocence that predated his mega-celebrity. It’s a callback to the nonsensical exultations of Lil B and Tyler, the Creator, who were committing upheaval in hip-hop’s underground at the same moment that Bieber was being ever more firmly slotted into pop superstardom. (It is also a vivid demonstration of the diminishing rate of nostalgia in action.)
Is it too late to go back? Never say never.
Justin Bieber
“Swag”
(Def Jam)
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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