You start to come across a bit deranged trying to concisely recap the discourse around Justin Bieber these days. Everyone suspects something is up thanks to his online oversharing, but no one can agree on what. People’s concerns range from the reasonable to the fantastical. If he shares a pic of a lit blunt, he gets Christian sobriety inspo in the comments; if he rips a bong, TMZ brings out Dr. Drew to pretend “the concentration of THC in weed approaches 100 percent” now. Some people think Bieber got facial paralysis in 2022 from the COVID-19 vaccine and not Ramsay Hunt syndrome, as he announced. Many attribute his confusing behavior to a secret addiction; others believe it’s the lure of a Christian cult. The conspiracy theories and armchair psych analyses don’t neatly converge. But the cycle of drama fueling paparazzi stalking and more headlines is drainingly familiar; comparisons to Ye and Britney Spears abound.
The bits we don’t need to speculate about seem daunting enough. Bieber’s neurological disorder forced him to cancel the world tour for 2021’s Justice, leaving him on the hook for a $26 million advance. The singer sold the rights to his back catalogue afterward — an eyebrow-raising move for anyone under 60, let alone 30 — giving an impression of yo-yoing finances as questions about marital distress percolated. Justin and Hailey Bieber became parents last summer, and Dad’s Instagram page is an often unnervingly frank document of the joy but also the power struggles of the growing family. In the meantime, his past drug use and depression were trotted back out in the lunacy of the Diddy rumor mill. Having left former manager Scooter Braun’s SB Projects, moving forward without the exec who first discovered him, Justin Bieber feels poignantly unmanaged. He announced his seventh studio album, SWAG, with billboards and sources whispering to magazines about its imminent release; the new music admits that things are far from perfect. It revels in unpredictability, in mix-and-match sounds and sunny moods subject to rain showers. It’s exhilarating stuff, music that exists for the enrichment of the artist and not for the sole purpose of being widely, comfortably consumed, though it does not lack commercial instincts.
The Prince-like “Go Baby” is indicative of the stormy scenes SWAG offers a window into. Blanketed by gossamer synths, a giddily mundane marital snapshot — “That’s my baby / She’s iconic / iPhone case / Lip gloss on it” — slowly gives way to some sort of quarrel. Moments later, Bieber is distraught, singing “nothing needs to work out, and nothing needs to break.” The verses and choruses don’t care what tawdry takeaways people see fit to draw from them, whether you do or don’t become convinced of clandestine love triangles explored in 50-minute YouTube videos. Bieber’s main agenda this cycle is simply toughing it out through today’s difficulties to prepare for tomorrow’s.
SWAG is every bit as musically unfettered as its author is psychologically transparent lately, spilling over with interests that were often sidelined to center pure pop exuberance. On one hand, it’s a frothy batch of verge-of-breakup anthems, a throwback R&B pivot inspired by the production and vocal penchants of emotional crooners of the late ’80s and early ’90s. But a feeling that the track list could veer into a cover of New Edition’s “Can You Stand the Rain” or Ralph Tresvant’s “Love Takes Time” — prickly stories where couples question their long-term viability — is offset by both folk flourishes and a flashing of mainstream hip-hop-nerd bona fides. This all gels in delightfully strange combinations: “Yukon,” its vocals pitched deliriously high, takes an acoustic approach to the darkly cherubic longing of Dallas singer 4batz, bouncing a youthful tone off of adult lyrics and R&B cadences off campfire sonics. Late-album highlight “405” blends clacky ’80s electric piano; aughts U.K. garage drums; and tasteful, churchy guitar accents in a song that lends itself equally to throwing ass and weeping. SWAG is simultaneously a hanging-out-with-rappers album — Sexyy Redd, Lil B, and Cash Cobain are here — and an album that seeks to create distance from fame by leaning into soft-rock territory with guitar prodigies mk.gee and Dijon in tow. The only constant as the music drifts through genres is the sense that Braun would have pushed for a load-bearing lead single and campaign of reassurance, and that’s probably why he’s not here.
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While the album presents as a splatter painting on the first pass, Bieber is threading a precarious needle throughout SWAG, repositioning himself in pop and R&B without making a screeching left turn away from the church pop of Justice and the wife-guy trap of 2020’s Changes. The headier grooves and conversational verses might disappoint fans waiting for a “Sorry” moment where the singer recommits to a more palatable sound and persona after a torrent of bad press; instead, Bieber defends his right to remain incomprehensible. But crane your neck and you see an acknowledgment of SZA as chart supreme of the 2020s. Her go-to producer and songwriter Carter Lang worked on every song; SWAG’s diaristic wordplay takes cues from Bieber and SZA’s team up for SOS’s “Snooze.” Her vision of brutally honest modern soul fits folk and pop punk in its frame; this is license for the Canadian YouTube busker, Usher protégé, and sometime wild boy to access all those parts of himself. He tried it over a decade ago on the post-Believe curio Journals, a skeletal and sometimes quite sad R&B album pawned off as a compilation whose first-week sales weren’t made public in the year of bad headlines leading up to Bieber’s 2014 Miami Beach DUI arrest. A “studio album” is typically a space for him to win everyone back, but this one is a retreat into his gifts, not a face-saving maneuver. The howling “Glory Voice Demo” transmutes his troubles into gritty gospel blues; the sweetly expectant “Daisies” — imagining Michael Jackson fronting Death Cab for Cutie for “The Way You Make Me Feel” — yields one of our greatest songs about anticipating a text while iMessage ellipses show the other person typing.
Justin Bieber is torching the image he and his team used to go to great lengths to maintain. His holy-rolling, easy-going veneer was untenable. And the expectations it garnered are difficult to shake; he reckons that you simply have to let people see you at both your artful best and acrimonious. Donning the mantle of nostalgic (trap) soul man Trying to Make Things Work is lucrative posturing, a battle-tested sonic palette for guys in a romantic tight spot. Bieber does seem interested in upkeep of this image; he wants you to know he’s tapped in enough to get that people still listen to Gunna despite the YSL trial Alford plea, and comic and rap-skit regular Druski approves of the work.
But the try-hard Bieber of old shows in “Soulful,” an interlude when Druski says “Your skin white, but your soul Black” after the breakbeat banger “First Place,” a mountain of synth pads threatening to segue into Thriller’s “Human Nature.” Another interlude attempts to spin scrutiny into meme gold, replaying the singer’s “it’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business” quip during a paparazzi argument like a catchphrase, compiling borrowed and slightly misunderstood Black and trans community slang. He’s only a few years removed from featuring Martin Luther King Jr. on Justice, David Guetta style. SWAG’s stoned but spirited forays into Black artists’ sonic signatures fit the pattern of playing to these tendencies most assertively when looking to escape or befuddle a pop crowd. He’s not slick with it, but he remains a frustratingly intuitive study. Even his tackiest instincts (on the album or off it) feed the overarching project of aching, scathing honesty that manages to avoid giving a concise answer to the question: What’s wrong with Justin Bieber? He’d rather we stopped asking, as we were brought up with a manufactured idea of him to which he struggled to adhere. SWAG stuns as an unceremonious, rocky reintroduction to the person we thought we knew.
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