{"id":8589,"date":"2025-09-11T02:16:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T02:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/8589\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T02:16:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T02:16:06","slug":"justin-biebers-swag-ii-makes-swag-look-like-a-rough-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/8589\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Bieber\u2019s \u2018Swag II\u2019 Makes \u2018Swag\u2019 Look Like a Rough Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe\u2019s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.<\/a><\/p>\n

Confession: Despite the hype over its surprise drop, the praise for tapping exciting artists<\/a> of the moment like Mk.Gee to shepherd its musical direction, and the proliferation of \u201cDaisies\u201d on Instagram Reels, Swag\u2014Justin Bieber\u2019s grand return to music after four years away\u2014did not do much for me. I appreciated the vision: One of contemporary pop\u2019s biggest stars stepping out of the algorithm factory and into his singer-songwriter bag with a healthy dose of Journals Biebervelli vibes, the kind of fluid approach that can lead to a formless song like the Cash Cobain-assisted<\/a> title track. All of that is cool, but none of it stuck to my ribs. Outside of a stray \u201cYukon\u201d spin here and there, I can\u2019t say I\u2019ve revisited or thought much about Swag (the album, not my own personal style, which I obsess over to the minute) in the two months since it\u2019s been out.<\/p>\n

So imagine my surprise Friday morning when I threw on Swag II, which Bieber had even more unceremoniously surprise-announced just a day prior\u2014and immediately loved it. Right off the rip, \u201cSpeed Demon\u201d made me hit the lean-forward meme<\/a> and actually lock in to what I figured would be a background listen I might not even complete. And for a majority of the album\u2019s (admittedly overlong) runtime, it really doesn\u2019t let up. Obviously Purpose<\/a> is the gold-standard Bieber album that he\u2019ll probably never match or outdo, but with a dark-red asterisk for recency bias, I\u2019m declaring this my second favorite Bieber project as far as top-to-bottom listens go.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to pinpoint what it is about Swag II that\u2019s connecting with me more than its predecessor\u2014it’s the same production and co-writing team, which includes Carter Lang, Dijon, Sir Dylan, Mk.Gee, and Eddie Benjamin. But simply put, they\u2019re all just executing the vision more strongly and thoroughly on the sequel. This album is funkier, groovier, livelier\u2014it\u2019s almost as if Swag was Biebs getting his form right and now he can really start ballin’.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that seems more dialed in here, it\u2019s the influences. Across tracks like \u201cSpeed Demon\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Wanna,\u201d Bieber accesses an R&B-ballad Michael Jackson zone that wouldn\u2019t have felt out of place on Bad or Dangerous; elsewhere on \u201cEye Candy\u201d there are traces of SWV (who famously sampled Mike\u2019s \u201cHuman Nature\u201d on \u201cRight Here.\u201d) The tender soft-spoken whispers of Swag 1.0 fan favorites like \u201cDevotion\u201d are evened out by more rousing power ballads like \u201cI Do\u201d and \u201cAll the Way.\u201d Throw a little \u201890s bedroom R&B in the blender along with the rest of these interpolations and influences, whether subconscious or intentional, and you get stirring hybrids like \u201cLove Song,\u201d or \u201cWhen It\u2019s Over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe\u2019s final word…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[1503,146,85,46,1850,409,9600,6612,5101],"class_list":{"0":"post-8589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-justin-bieber","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-tap-in","15":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","16":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}