Stream every standout album released this Friday with The FADER’s weekly roundup.
Every Friday, The FADER’s writers dive into the most exciting new projects released that week. Today, read our thoughts on Justin Bieber’s SWAG, Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out, Wet Leg’s Moisturizer, and more.
Justin Bieber: SWAG
As one of the world’s pre-eminent pop stars, Justin Bieber’s never been afraid to zag left instead of right. That spirit heralded 2015’s Purpose, his acclaimed electronic pivot after an early career of churning out teeny bopper radio hits. He’s done it again with SWAG, announced less than 24 hours prior to its release and arriving during a socially fraught period for the singer and new father. The album sports a ’90s-adjacent synth pop vibe within a cohesive and unexpectedly grounded-sounding run of 21 songs that don’t feel winded nor overstuffed. Gunna, Sexyy Red, Lil B, Cash Cobain, Dijon, and Mk.gee all lent a helping hand, and it’s the latter two artists who feel like they’ve left the deepest fingerprints across Bieber’s still ringingly pop croon. They add a crucial aura of elevated sophistication to his otherwise re-trodden lyrics about loving Hailey Bieber and loving God. Mk.gee’s guitar add a spectral glow to “Daisies” and every other track (though he’s uncredited). Dijon’s wild, soulful runs, heard on “Devotion,” is the blueprint that it sounds like Bieber is following on “Go Baby,” and “Butterflies.” There are comparisons to mid-career MJ too, but as a whole these songs sound more updated than that — with indeed, an undeniable swag. —Steffanee Wang
Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music
Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out
Always the more ruminative rapper in Clipse, Malice spent nearly a decade and a half disavowing his work in Clipse as blasphemous; as he returns to the group for their fourth album Let God Sort Em Out, Malice is Jacob wrestling with the angel, reconciling his faith with his first earthly calling. This is the emotional core of the album that allows both Pusha T and Malice drape themselves in their mortality like never before, exposing new traumas, personal shortcomings, and grief. The shift is a daring move that will prompt deeper listens of their entire catalogue, and produces a solid, occasionally brilliant project in its own right. — Jordan Darville. Read our full review here.
Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music
Wet Leg: moisturizer
In an age when “breaking out” as a band means, at best, a spot on Jimmy Fallon’s show, Wet Leg’s rise was particularly rapid. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers’s 2022 song “Chaise Longue” propelled the childhood friends from obscurity on the Isle of Man to transatlantic success, an opening slot for Harry Styles and a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. This rise is addressed on “U and Me At Home,” the closing song on Wet Leg’s hugely enjoyable second album. “Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,” Teasdale sings. “Well, that didn’t quite go to plan … now we’ve been stretched across the world.” Cynics might have looked at “Chaise Longue,” an off-kilter song with lyrics about buttered muffins, and consign it to the quirky one-hit-wonder pile. moisturizer makes that view look short-sighted with a collection of confident indie rock songs that buzz with excitement and new love. Vocalist Teasdale is at the center of those who, having previously dated men, began a queer relationship with a new partner. She writes about this development with a mixture of lust and comfort, with the former addressed in the album’s buzzing highlight “Pillow Talk” (“Every night I lick my pillow I wish I was licking with you”) and the latter name checking a 2000s U.K. reality TV host (“Davina McCall”). Elsewhere “CPR” imagines a world in which Nick Cave fronted Britpop heroes Elastica, while the classic rock riffs of “Don’t Speak” make way for knack of a new entry into the band’s compendium of food-based lyrics (“We go together like salsa and Doritos.”). If Wet Leg started as a joke, moisturize suggests the fun is only getting started. — David Renshaw
Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
d.silvestre: O Que as Mulheres Querem
d.silvestre is a baile funk DJ with baile funk bona fides, but his new album O Que as Mulheres Querem (What Women Want) is not a baile funk album in the traditional sense. Listening to the São Paulo-via-Rondônia producer’s 2024 self-titled LP (his first record to cross over in earnest to a non-Brazilian audience), one hears definite traces of bass music from the global north. Still, that record is firmly rooted in baile staples — the clave, the bass drum, the a capella rap runs leading into the pummeling tum-tá-tá tum-tá-tá drops. These elements exist here too; opener “Vem por Cima,” for instance, would be a relatively straightforward funk track were it not for its left-field timbres. From there, though, silvestre dives into a deep end where thumping techno and skeletal percussion lurk below the surface. But d.silvestre is by no means beholden to any tradition other than his own, and O Que as Mulheres Querem — despite its slick, cosmopolitan feel — is a distinctly Brazilian work of art. São Paulo is, lest we forget, the biggest city in the western hemisphere. — Raphael Helfand
Hear it: Spotify
Other projects out today that you should listen to
96 Back: F Season
Andy Boay: You Took That Walk for the Two of Us
AyooLii: Supply & Demand
Boldy James & Nicholas Craven: Late to My Own Funeral
Brutus VIII: Do It for the Money EP
Burna Boy: No Sign of Weakness
Fatboi Sharif & GDP: Endocrine
Gina Birch: Trouble
GIVĒON: Beloved
Goon: Dream 3
Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson, & Carlos Niño: Openness Trio
Open Mike Eagle: Neighborhood Gods Unlimited
Rob49: Let Me Fly (Deluxe)
SINN6R: 2Often
The Swell Season, Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová: Forward
Tony Njoku: All Our Knives Are Always Sharp