In the mid-2010s, pop music changed. Instead of hounding the listening public with focus-grouped, machine-tooled crowd-pleasers, the biggest stars began releasing expansive, experimental albums that played to their own tastes and interests. These were records that were artistically self-indulgent, mostly in a good way: Rihanna’s sleazy, sultry Anti, Beyoncé’s densely referential Lemonade, Lady Gaga’s soft-rock-heavy Joanne, Miley Cyrus’s psychedelic Wayne Coyne collaboration Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (I may be the only person who holds that example in such high regard.)
With his fourth album Purpose, Justin Bieber was adjacent to this shift. Leaning into the ascendant tropical house genre, collaborating with Skrillex and pursuing a sound you sensed a 21-year-old might actually like, it spelled the end of Bieber’s career as a cheesy tween idol and repositioned him as a leading figure in the pop zeitgeist. But Purpose still felt like an album designed to spew highly accessible hits. And it did.
A decade on, however – after backsliding into forgettable, generic pop on 2021’s Justice – Bieber has finally made what seems to be a genuine 2015-style passion project. Swag, the 31-year-old’s surprise-released seventh album, opens extremely promisingly with All I Can Take, a hauntological twist on spotless, energetic 1980s R&B: echoey vocals, fast, faded beats, maudlin synths that seem half-remembered from a dream. Abetted by a songwriting and production team that includes Carter Lang (SZA), Tobias Jesso Jr (Dua Lipa, Adele), Eddie Benjamin, Dylan Wiggins and Daniel Chetrit, the sonic vibe echoes throughout the album.
It comes festooned with layered melisma on Butterflies, gated reverb and laser-style synths on the gorgeous Too Long and hyperactive, washed-out drums on First Place. Elsewhere, Bieber’s default sweet and smooth R&B base is counterbalanced by chugging guitar and crashing percussion (the Mk.gee-produced Daisies) and fingers-on-fretboard squeaks of acoustic guitar (the lo-fi Zuma House). Lil B collaboration Dadz Love merges gospelly vocals with a fuzzy breakbeat and blissed-out synths to similarly beautiful effect.
It’s all very considered, cleverly nostalgic and subtly satisfying – there’s not a craven chart smash in earshot. Lyrically, however, Swag isn’t such a classy and thoughtful affair. Dadz Love is an inane celebration of Bieber’s nascent fatherhood that essentially just repeats the title into meaninglessness. The other love songs – which are addressed to his wife, Hailey, whose viral lip gloss-holding phone case gets a shout-out on Go Baby – rarely transcend superficial, saccharine cliche. But they are at least preferable to the eye-watering spoken-word segments.
During a handful of conversations with internet personality Druski, Bieber bemoans the reaction to his discomfitingly intimate social media posts, which have worried fans in recent months (if “people are always asking if I’m OK … it starts to make me feel like I’m the one with issues and everyone else is perfect”). He gets gently ribbed about his altercations with the paparazzi – two examples of which are sampled on this album – and told, sycophantically, that despite his white skin, his musicality is such that he must have a “Black” soul.
These cringeworthy interludes show a Bieber determined to refute the unflattering caricature of him that prevails in the tabloid sphere. But you would struggle to find much evidence of a three-dimensional human being in his lyrics, which are low on specifics, insight or originality. Despite the album’s seductive, almost spookily evocative sound, the lasting impression is one of eerie emptiness. Swag has moments of brilliance, but this is no long-awaited masterpiece.
