Every half or less, Justin Bieber takes off his calluse skin of the pop superstar that became 15 years to reveal the tender and peculiar R&B singer who has always been in the heart. He did it in 2013 with his album “Journals”, then in 2020 with “changes.”
None of the projects did anything like the number of their most brilliant and brightest teenagers, although each one seemed like a crucial restart for a guy who fights the pressures of early onset celebrities. Now, at 31, he has done it again with “Swag”, the surprise LP that dropped Thursday night just hours after revealing that it existed.
Like those previous albums, the “swag” of 21 tracks occurs after a period of change and tumult for Bieber. In 2022, citing the need to concentrate on his health, he canceled a world tour behind the album “Justice” of the previous year; In 2023, he separated from his former manager, Scooter Braun; Last year, he and his wife, Hailey Baldwin, had their first child together. (Somewhere there also sold the rights of its music catalog for $ 200 million). More recently, he has been captured in a video in a series of confrontations with paparazzi that began to talk about their well -being.
“It doesn't cost you to be standing in business,” he tells a photographer in a clip that went viral last month, so viral, in fact, that Bieber extracts it in “booty”, that he puts his delicious crooning on the spacious and cooled thickness full of pillow synthesizers, electric guitars and turns to the beats.
What distinguishes “swag” from “magazines” and “changes” is that this album feels much more raw and more improvised than the previous ones; Production at all times is murky and stained, and the album includes a couple of demonstration clues that suggest that Bieber simply shot the voice notes without finishing his phone who was sitting behind the computer in the recording studio. (One of them, a small and beautiful itithy, is titled “Memo de Voz de Gloria”). The idea that “Swag” is quite sympathy is that a messy life; Let's not forget that Bieber is also involved in a Christian organization that some have compared with a cult: produces messy music.
“When money comes and money goes / the only thing left is the love we hold,” “Butterflies” sings in the Truming, which shows another of those deceased of paparazzi. “Make moving away”, a slightly psychedelic soul rock jam, makes him describe the challenges of his marriage highly scrutinized with an endearing frankness about his desire to know emotionally. (Braun, who is said that Bieber paid millions of dollars recently to resolve an old debt, wrote on Instagram that “swag” “is undoubtedly the most authentically album of Justin Bieber to date”).
Not spraying his music, the singer is also adapting to the scruffy and proudly idiosyncratic pop environment of modern pop as is found in records such as SZA, Charli XCX, Lana del Rey, even Drake, stars that have achieved domination in the era of transmission not by not being a rationalized vision, but by following the trip of listening. One of Bieber's key collaborators is MK.gee, the mysterious virtuoso of the guitar whose debut in 2024 made him perhaps the most commented musician's musician in recent years. “Swag” feels molded by the way MK.gee thinks of how a great pop song should balance novelty and familiarity. Other members of the creative team Bieber met for Jam's sessions at home in Los Angeles include Dijon, a frequent partner of MK.gee's and Carter Lang, who has worked closely with SZA.
Given the watchful nature of Bieber and his good taste, think of his relatively anticipated participation of the curve in “Essence” and “Despacito” of Wizkid of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, he probably believes that in 2025 he made a record that imagines Phil Collins sitting with Scritti Politti. However, as a luxury handling player at the rough edges, Bieber is only among his companions of white pop (or at least the few of them who remain close to the center of the conversation): Benson Boone is making flips on their back spell in the spell in the folia. And then there is Morgan Wallen, whose gloomy and bleak “I am the problem” is so loudly in that you almost fear what the enormous success of the album will end up doing the guy.
Does Bieber enjoy your atypical status? In one of the various very short interludes in “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, replies: “Thank you.” Even so, it cannot be discussed with Druski's evaluation that can “listen to the soul” in this album: Bieber's song has never sounded more instinctive than in songs like the crisp iPhone-Case-Lip-Lip-Gloss-Holder. “405”, a song about flirting with Baldwin in the car that rhymes “hits the gas” with “spider-man on your back”.
Shaggy, dramator, often quite beautiful, the LP argues that the booty is not something that is taught (as in fact, Bieber once enlisted someone to do), neither a skill nor a technique to be perfected and deployed. It is a mental state, brother. Is that marking you?
