Like those earlier albums, the 21-track \u201cSwag\u201d comes after a period of change and tumult for Bieber. In 2022, citing the need to focus on his health, he called off a world tour behind the previous year\u2019s \u201cJustice<\/a>\u201d album; in 2023, he parted ways with his longtime manager, Scooter Braun; last year, he and his wife, Hailey Baldwin, had their first child together. (Somewhere in there he also sold the rights to his music catalog for a reported $200 million.) More recently, he\u2019s been caught on video in a series of confrontations with paparazzi that started people talking about his well-being. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not clocking to you that I\u2019m standing on business,\u201d he tells a photographer in one clip that went viral last month \u2014 so viral, in fact, that Bieber excerpts it on \u201cSwag,\u201d which puts his luscious crooning over spacey, cooled-out grooves full of pillowy synths, twanging electric guitars and reverbed chillwave-\u201980s beats.<\/p>\n What distinguishes \u201cSwag\u201d from \u201cJournals\u201d and \u201cChanges\u201d is that this album feels much rawer and more improvisatory than the earlier ones; the production throughout is murky and smeared, and the record includes a couple of demo-like tracks that suggest Bieber simply AirDropped unfinished voice memos from his phone to whomever was sitting behind the computer in the recording studio. (One of them, a gorgeous little gospel-blues ditty, is titled \u201cGlory Voice Memo.\u201d) The idea that \u201cSwag\u201d puts across pretty sympathetically is that a messy life \u2014 let\u2019s not forget that Bieber is also involved in a Christian organization that some have compared to a cult \u2014 yields messy music.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the money comes and the money goes \/ Only thing that\u2019s left is the love we hold,\u201d he sings in the thrumming \u201cButterflies,\u201d which samples another of those paparazzi run-ins. \u201cWalking Away,\u201d a lightly psychedelic soul-rock jam, has him describing the challenges of his highly scrutinized marriage with an endearing frankness about his desire to wise up emotionally. (Braun, whom Bieber is said to have paid millions of dollars recently to settle an old debt, wrote on Instagram that \u201cSwag\u201d \u201cis, without a doubt, the most authentically Justin Bieber album to date.\u201d)<\/p>\n In un-polishing his music, the singer is also adapting to the scrappy and proudly idiosyncratic vibe of modern pop as found on records by the likes of SZA<\/a>, Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey<\/a>, even Drake \u2014 A-plus stars who\u2019ve achieved domination in the streaming era not by honing a streamlined vision but by pursuing odd impulses and allowing the listener to feel like part of the journey. One of Bieber\u2019s key collaborators here is Mk.gee, the mysterious guitar virtuoso whose 2024 debut made him perhaps the most talked-about musician\u2019s musician of the last few years. \u201cSwag\u201d feels shaped by the way Mk.gee thinks about how a great pop song should balance novelty and familiarity. Other members of the creative team Bieber gathered for loose jam sessions at his home in Los Angeles include Dijon, a frequent partner of Mk.gee\u2019s, and Carter Lang, who\u2019s worked closely with SZA.<\/p>\n Given Bieber\u2019s attentive nature and his good taste \u2014 think of his relatively ahead-of-the-curve participation in remixes of Wizkid\u2019s \u201cEssence\u201d and \u201cDespacito\u201d by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee \u2014 it probably figures that in 2025 he\u2019d make a record that imagines Phil Collins sitting in with Scritti Politti. Yet as a tinkerer luxuriating in rough edges, Bieber stands alone among his fellow white male pop stars (or at least the few of them who remain near the center of the conversation): Benson Boone is doing well-rehearsed back flips on every awards show stage that will have him, while Ed Sheeran has said his upcoming album represents a return to his old hit-seeking ways after a spell in the folky wilderness. And then there\u2019s Morgan Wallen, whose thematically gloomy \u201cI\u2019m the Problem\u201d is so sonically dialed in that you almost fear what the album\u2019s enormous success will end up doing to the guy.<\/p>\n Does Bieber relish his outlier status? In one of several very cringe interludes on \u201cSwag,\u201d the internet comedian Druski tells the singer that, although his skin is white, his soul is Black \u2014 to which Bieber, clearly operating without the guidance of a strong manager, responds, \u201cThank you.\u201d Still, you can\u2019t argue with Druski\u2019s assessment that he can \u201chear the soul\u201d on this album: Bieber\u2019s singing has never sounded more instinctual than in songs like the crunchy \u201cDaisies\u201d and the country-soul \u201cDevotion,\u201d and even when they\u2019re bad, his lyrics have an awkward charm, as in \u201cGo Baby,\u201d in which he plugs the iPhone-case-slash-lip-gloss-holder sold by his wife\u2019s beauty brand, and \u201c405,\u201d a song about flirting with Baldwin in the car that rhymes \u201cHit the gas\u201d with \u201cSpider-Man on your ass.\u201d<\/p>\n Shaggy, disarming, often quite beautiful, the LP argues that swag is not something to be taught (as indeed Bieber once famously enlisted someone to do) \u2014 neither a skill nor a technique to be perfected and deployed. It\u2019s a state of mind, bro. Is that clocking to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every half-decade or so, Justin Bieber sloughs off the callused skin of the pop superstar he became at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-8178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1752465183_1_hqdefault.jpg\")
<\/p>\n