Justin Bieber’s boring SWAG: Review

Over his lushest production to date, the pop star is still TBD on what he’d like to say.

“That’s been a tough thing for me recently,” Justin Bieber murmurs on “Therapy Session,” the second of three skits with the comedian Druski from his seventh studio album SWAG. “I have had to go through a lot of my struggles as a human […] really publicly.” Druski has a solution: “You start smokin’ these Black & Milds with me, bro, you gon’ feel way better[…] You ever had a jazz tip?”

This past spring, Bieber’s fans grew concerned that the singer had relapsed on drugs, which his representatives stridently denied. This was partly due to his verklempt appearance at various public outings, but also his erratic and eccentric Instagram posting. Bieber dismisses those worries on SWAG (via Druski), but you get the sense that the hundreds of thousands of likes and comments on his low-effort snaps had an impact on how he’s approached this album. On the new record, Bieber keeps his cards close to his chest, carving out oblique pop songs over some of his lushest production to date. It’s a particularly tasteful offering that taps into synthpop and new wave and leans into a singer-songwriter posture. But though Bieber keens on its very first verse that it “feels personal when no one’s listening,” what he’d like to say to the general public is TBD. Forget insight — he doesn’t even want to give us details. That leaves most of these songs languishing as hollow style exercises trafficking in generic romantic tropes.

Sparser arrangements aren’t a bad fit for Bieber, whose clear tones and resonant falsetto appreciate the added room to amble. “THINGS YOU DO” sets his voice flush against a plucked topline as Justin cruises around with an ex; when he croons about, “the little things you do,” a twanging countermelody and 2-and-4 snaps hit like an acoustic beat drop. On “GLORY VOICE MEMO,” Bieber stops just short of wailing out to God amidst staticky fog, his plaintive vocals mirroring his raw, simple language: “I reach out my haaaaaaaand / begging mercyyyyy.” Prettier still is “ZUMA HOUSE,” where Bieber’s sighs are overshadowed by an undulating arpeggio.

There’s an implicit humility in these tracks’ rough hewn edges and soft focus on Bieber’s vocals, placing the pop star on the same level as his production. While only the first of those three songs credit Dijon as producer (Carter Lang and Eddie Benjamin handled the majority of the project), the Baltimore-via-Los Angeles musician’s fingerprints are all over the project, as are those of Dijon’s close collaborator mk.gee.

Back in 2021, Dijon told The FADER that he sees his and mk.gee’s work together as a “meditative and hypnotic ode to R&B […] the end of R&B, in my mind.” SWAG charts a few potential paths those hypnagogic impulses might take to reach radio stations around the world. The shimmering chords of “405” swell until a breakcore drum pattern tugs Bieber into a whirlpool, his pleas for love coiling into zen mantras; this repetition crops up again on standout “BUTTERFLIES” and “GO BABY,” where Justin flexes his wife’s billion-dollar business.

That’s as far off the beaten path as SWAG dares to venture, an album that’d rather slow things down and stick close to home. Previous ballads from Bieber like “Love Yourself” felt supercharged for their cutting wit, but the writing here is bland, inert. When Dijon pops through on “DEVOTION,” the throwaway line, “don’t waste another dime, that’s good jukebox money,” suddenly transports us, gesturing at a vividly rendered world just outside the frame of the song. It’s a world apart from Bieber’s paean to smoking weed while watching Hailey’s favorite TV shows.

“DAISIES” is so pleasant you can overlook its juvenile metaphors, but the song’s straightforward rhythms feel more Post Malone than post-mk.gee, despite a co-writing credit. Back in December, the New Jersey singer-songwriter said of working with Bieber, “anything that comes out of his mouth — that’s pop music. You can do some pretty wild stuff behind that.” But SWAG is too manicured to get in the dirt. Part of what elevated Dijon’s Absolutely and mk.gee’s Two Star & The Dream Police was the sensation that their songs might, at any moment, crumple in on themselves or mushroom into stellar shrapnel. Squeezed into more standard meter and structure, these tracks are far less distinct than their personnel credits might lead you to believe. As with Bieber’s mumble rap snippets, the wildest stuff must be locked away on some hard drive we’ll be lucky to hear on IG Live.

Speaking of hip-hop experiments, none of the rap features here approach the bizarre, Frankensteinian quality of Bieber’s “WTHELLY” remix, or really even nod to his tapped-in Instagram soundtracks (SahBabii, 1900 Rugrat, Drakeo the Ruler). Gunna and Sexyy Red are careful to not rock the boat, but you’d rather they distract from Bieber’s anodyne domestic aspirations and candy shop innuendos (“I like it sticky in the sheets.”). Cash Cobain fares better on the title track thanks to its much fuller low-end, though Eddie Benjamin’s best Playboi Carti impression doesn’t add much to Bieber’s thinnest writing on the album: “Your body on me, on me, you’re so fine.” A transmission by Lil B on “DADZ LOVE” aims to shore up the popstar’s tapped-in bonafides, but the Bay Area artist’s history of messaging underage girls taints whatever residual clout Bieber was hoping to hijack.

Back to that jazz tip — the first time Druski pushes the cigar on Bieber (to the delight of Altria stockholders worldwide), the comedian has just finished informing the singer he’s “more than 2%… your skin’s white but your soul’s black.” I’m inclined to assume he’s trolling, but this escalation, even as a joke, from Justice’s MLK Jr. interpolations points to Bieber’s lingering racial anxieties. Blue-eyed soul doesn’t die, it reinvents itself: Even satirically smoking his problems away comes wrapped in hood aesthetics. Despite a retreat into more strictly pop palettes, Bieber, like America, remains preoccupied with Black cool.

From SWAG, it’s clocking to me that Justin is mindful, demure, and above all thankful for the support of Black fans given his prior use of the N-word and other, lesser controversies. The underlying defensiveness of these fawning skits, and the record’s predominantly Black features, show that Bieber is aware of the cultural cachet he’s trying to tap into — even if the nuances escape him. Case in point: another skit with Druski regarding a recent paparazzi encounter hones in on Bieber’s pronunciation of “business,” completely ignoring that the driving factor behind that viral moment was Bieber absolutely butchering African American Vernacular English with “it’s not clocking to you.” It’s sort of endearing that even someone so removed from regular life might still desperately seek the approval of their fellow man, but it’s an awkward stance for any artist, let alone one of the most-watched on earth.

Yet I still can’t quite shake the hope Bieber will one day turn around a contemporary classic. There are glimmers of it on “YUKON,” which bounces from GMCs to Rolls Royces and deploys Bieber’s pinched upper register and 2 Chainz adlibs to nonchalantly bed the object of his affection. It’s not that the song is so substantive but compared to everything else it’s crisp and idiosyncratic. Yes, I do believe Bieber would refer to his wife’s anatomy as “Slide City.” When he smirks, “I pull up like Jimmy Neutron,” it’s actually goofy (JB’s clearly been bumping “BeBe’s Kids”). And on the chorus, when he’s musing aloud, “What would I do? If I didn’t love you?” his voice sounds like it might crack, or shatter. For a second, he’s not Justin, just human.