In the mid-2010s, pop tune changed. As an different of hounding the listening public with focus-grouped, machine-tooled crowd-pleasers, the largest stars started releasing tall, experimental albums that performed to their very discover tastes and interests. These had been facts that had been artistically self-indulgent, mostly in a factual formula: Rihanna’s sleazy, sultry Anti, Beyoncé’s densely referential Lemonade, Woman Gaga’s gentle-rock-heavy Joanne, Miley Cyrus’s psychedelic Wayne Coyne collaboration Miley Cyrus & Her Unnecessary Petz (I will also be the accurate one who holds that instance in such excessive regard.)
Alongside with his fourth album Reason, Justin Bieber became adjacent to this shift. Leaning into the ascendant tropical dwelling fashion, collaborating with Skrillex and pursuing a sound you sensed a 21-year-former might well well presumably presumably in truth like, it spelled the live of Bieber’s profession as a tacky tween idol and repositioned him as a leading pick in the pop zeitgeist. Nevertheless Reason restful felt like an album designed to spew extremely accessible hits. And it did.
A decade on, nonetheless – after backsliding into forgettable, generic pop on 2021’s Justice – Bieber has lastly made what appears to be like to be to be an accurate 2015-fashion ardour mission. Swag, the 31-year-former’s shock-released seventh album, opens extremely promisingly with All I Can Take, a hauntological twist on spotless, packed with life 1980s R&B: echoey vocals, snappily, former beats, maudlin synths that seem half-remembered from a dream. Abetted by a songwriting and production crew that involves Carter Lang (SZA), Tobias Jesso Jr (Dua Lipa, Adele), Eddie Benjamin, Dylan Wiggins and Daniel Chetrit, the sonic vibe echoes at some stage in the album.
It comes festooned with layered melisma on Butterflies, gated reverb and laser-fashion synths on the gorgeous Too Long and hyperactive, washed-out drums on First Enlighten. In completely different places, Bieber’s default sweet and subtle R&B tainted 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 Dwelling). Lil B collaboration Dadz Fancy merges gospelly vocals with a fuzzy breakbeat and blissed-out synths to equally gorgeous manufacture.
It’s all very regarded as, cleverly nostalgic and subtly stress-free – there’s no longer a craven chart rupture in earshot. Lyrically, nonetheless, Swag isn’t this kind of refined and considerate affair. Dadz Fancy is an inane occasion of Bieber’s nascent fatherhood that in truth impartial appropriate repeats the title into meaninglessness. The different worship songs – that are addressed to his wife, Hailey, whose viral lip gloss-maintaining phone case will get a yowl-out on Scuttle Toddler – as soon as in some time transcend superficial, saccharine cliche. Nevertheless they are a minimum of preferable to the ogle-watering spoken-notice segments.
For the length of a handful of conversations with web personality Druski, Bieber bemoans the response to his discomfitingly intimate social media posts, which possess alarmed fans in most modern months (if “other folks are always asking if I’m OK … it begins to invent me in truth feel like I’m the one with points and all and sundry else is more healthy”). He will get gently ribbed about his altercations with the paparazzi – two examples of that are sampled on this album – and urged, sycophantically, that despite his white skin, his musicality is such that he’ll must possess a “Gloomy” soul.
These cringeworthy interludes show a Bieber certain to refute the unflattering sketch of him that prevails in the tabloid sphere. Nevertheless that you simply might well perchance war to earn grand evidence of a third-dimensional human being in his lyrics, that are low on specifics, insight or originality. Whatever the album’s seductive, almost spookily evocative sound, the lasting impression is one amongst eerie vacancy. Swag has moments of brilliance, nonetheless right here will not be any lengthy-awaited masterpiece.