Just in case it’s not clocking to you, Justin Bieber is so standing on business right now. The pop superstar is back with his excellent new surprise album Swag, a comeback he announced only hours before it dropped. It’s been four years since we’ve gotten new music from Bieber, and he’s got a lot to say, since he’s been through it in recent years. It’s got slick R&B, raw voice-memo rock-guitar sketches, experimental collabos with Mk.gee and Dijon. He throws down with Cash Cobain, Gunna, and Sexyy Red. Yet it’s all him, as he chronicles the day-to-day struggles of Bieberhood.
Bieber’s last album was his 2021 Justice, a star-studded breakthrough spawning the hit “Peaches,” the most sensual tribute to the erotics of fruit since Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar” and “Cherry.” But at 31, he’s taking stock of his adult life. He spends Swag addressing his tribulations, whether personal or business. As you may have heard, this guy’s had some issues lately — becoming a dad, cancelling a massive tour to attend to mental health concerns, well-publicized altercations with the paparazzi, chaotic smoke-and-post social media rants, gossip about his marriage, de-Scootifying his business life.
There is so much healing going on in this album, it’s no surprise Bieber includes three different “therapy sessions” with the comedian Druski, getting up close and personal about his life. “That’s been a tough thing for me recently, is feeling like I have had to go through a lot of my struggles as a human, as all of us do, really publicly,” he confides. “And so people are always asking if I’m OK, and that starts to really weigh on me.” That takes a toll. “It starts to make me feel like I’m the one with issues and everyone else is perfect.”
But if he’s looking to answer all the “what the hell’s happening to this guy?” headlines, he couldn’t do much better than Swag, because the musical energy and imagination here is Bieber at his most confident. Serious question: Has he ever done as a song as appealing as “Butterflies”? A song this open-hearted, this melodic, this effusive, with a bittersweet R&B tune and pop uplift, plus a quivering guitar hook that comes straight from (of all people) the Smashing Pumpkins? Swag isn’t just Bieber out to prove he’s doing OK — he’s out to top himself.
He covers so much ground here musically, with the R&B-pop glitz of “All I Can Take” and “Go Baby,” but also lo-fi acoustic demos. He works with ace producers like Carter Lang, Eddie Benjamin, and Tobias Jesso Jr., with a woozy Eighties R&B vibe. (Bieber, like the rest of us, has clearly been dangerously obsessed with SZA’s SOS.)
Some of the “therapy sessions” might hit the cringe button, but then, so do yours, probably. Druski shouldn’t even bother applying for his therapist license, since his approach to counseling is to keep offering the patient a hit on some dubious cigar while cracking jokes. He assures Bieber, “Your skin white, but your soul Black, Justin. I promise you, man.” But he also clowns him about the infamous clip where he yells “I’m standing on business” at the paparrazzi. (“You can’t pronunciate every word when you doing that!”)
“Sweet Spot” is a slightly different kind of therapy session, where Bieber informs Sexyy Red, “I like it sticky between the sheets.” These two explore a little sexual healing for a freaky slow jam. “At first I was shy, but I’m a dog when I be in them sheets,” she raps. (Wait, when exactly was Sexyy Red’s shy era? Did we just miss that?) “That’s my G-spot, he make my coochie pop/I’m a changed woman, used to be a thot-thot/That’s my boyfriend, I love him a lot.”
Bieber spends a lot of time here singing about hanging onto his wife Hailey, with the pensive “Walking Away.” “Girl, we better stop before we say some shit,” he sings, in a genuinely wise lightbulb moment. “We’ve been testing our patience/I think we’re better off if we just take a break and remember what grace is.”
He’s making sure nobody doubts his commitment to being a husband and dad. “Go Baby” gives Hailey a pep talk, especially impressed by the fact that she built a lucrative beauty brand around a phone case. He sings, “That’s my baby, she’s iconic/iPhone case, lipgloss on it.” He celebrates fatherhood with “Dadz Love,” teaming up with the most based of gods, Lil B. They turn it into a universal we-are-family anthem, as Lil B urges, “We need more people to get together.”
“Devotion” is a Dijon collaboration that goes even beyond what you’d hope: even warmer, more uplifting, more understatedly gorgeous, with discreet echoes of pedal-steel guitar over the country-soul harmonies. Along with “Butterflies,” it’s the most immediately embraceable track on Swag. “Daisies” teams up with Mk.gee for a Phil Collins-style mid-Eighties synth-pop bop with distorted beats and Mr. Mister-style guitar, the kind of retro shopping-mall trip that makes you picture Toto listening to wild dogs cry out in the night.
But some of the best moments on Swag come when he leaves the pop production behind and goes lo-fi. “Zuma House” is a stripped-down acoustic-guitar ballad in the mode of Neil Young’s Hitchhiker, 83 seconds of raw beauty, while “Glory Voice Memo” is a bluesy micro-jam; both tracks sound like they got recorded on a phone and just uploaded straight to the album. “Yukon” is a slightly glossier version, with chipmunked vocals aiming for the Prince effect of Camille-era classics like “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”
For the big finale, he gets his praise on for Jesus in “Forgiveness,” with gospel star and pastor Marvin Wayans. Swag definitely makes it clear that Bieber’s got issues — his issues have issues. But he channels it all into some of the most genuinely creative and wide-ranging music of his life. “You can’t spread your wings in a bird cage,” as he sings in “First Place.” But all over Swag, he’s taking flight.
