Justin Bieber - SWAG
Justin Bieber
SWAG
Release Date: July 11th, 2025
Label: ILH/Def Jam
There are more days now that I feel bad for Justin Bieber. His rise to prominence occurred when I was in high school and he wasn’t much younger than me. He was catapulted into the spotlight, right on the cusp of social media beginning its inevitable journey from being a fun toy to a bloodstream-embedded, attention-grabbing “necessity” that continues to dominate our culture in ridiculous ways. Our generation grew up in a world fueled by social media, and your life could be potentially ruined and scrutinized under a microscope. For me, it didn’t mean much. For him, he’s subjected to the same fate as all pop stars before him. Except this time, every faux-pas, outburst, or bad day is written in ink on the Internet, permanently etched onto gossip sites and fueled by the algorithms they are powered by, there to be rewound and watched again and again and again.
Add in that he was conditioned from such a young age to have everything meticulously plotted out (everything from the sound of the music for a particular album to what he would have to wear on a daily basis), and I would be a bitter individual, too. Bieber has been the subject of serious media scrutiny, particularly over the last year and a half, with rumors about his marriage, his social media usage, the last-minute cancellation of a stadium tour, and outbursts at paparazzi. So when Bieber surprised fans by dropping a new twenty-one-track album on Friday, July 11th, all eyes were on him. It was a pretty smart move to turn the conversation from who he is on TMZ to what he really wants to be, a musician that’s taken seriously.
SWAG is an interesting entry in Justin Bieber’s catalog. It’s not a great album, but it is the first thing that he’s produced without the management of Scooter Braun, Bieber’s first and longtime manager, with whom he recently severed ties. There is no specific “image” here, as there was on any of the saccharine-sweet pop albums that defined his career as a teenager, like My World 2.0 and Believe. The songs on SWAG, most of which barely clock in around three minutes, sound more like ideas than fully sketched-out songs.
On the album’s halfway point, “DADZ LOVE”, Bieber collaborates with rapper Lil B for a song that essentially seems to set up the point of being good to one another, yet feels like the extended intro to a completely different song. I kept waiting halfway through for another element of the song to kick in and take it to the next level, to no avail. This sums up most of the songs on SWAG, barely starting to crest over the top of what could be another element that makes these songs go from “fine” to “excellent”. He doesn’t have to be whatever the traditional mainstream pop style is that we’ve known from him - lord knows every artist has their own interpretation into what that mainstream style is, as it’s been redefined countless times over the decades by stars like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, I could keep going down this list.
The conundrum with SWAG is that it tries to poise Bieber as finally being unrestricted, no holds barred, completely raw and honest, yet the result feels like he’s bored singing every number. Bieber definitely has vocal range, but barely any of it is showcased throughout the nearly-hour-long SWAG. The irony is that the moments on the album that were straight-up iPhone voice memos - “GLORY VOICE MEMO” and “ZUMA HOUSE” - have more soul and passion in them than any of the words he sings about sex and love.
None of these songs - most of which feature at least five co-writers - can decide whether they want to be an homage to 90s boy band ballads, a soulful R&B number, an easy-listening track, or a modern hip-hop collaboration. The completely out-of-place interludes that find Bieber talking with comedian Druski don’t help the situation; one of the sketches shows Druski effusively telling Justin that he “sounds black” and how he has so much soul on this record. It’s a strange choice to keep that as an interlude for your album.
Listening to SWAG is frustrating because Bieber is finally getting full creative control, and the results feel lackluster at best. All of this being said - it’s frustrating because I think he can eventually make a great album independently from the industrial mainstream pop machine that birthed him. But SWAG feels more like a first draft than a full, fleshed-out album, and it could have resulted in some more time spent at the drawing board. I commend him for taking a shot and for trying to showcase vulnerability. I do get what he says on one of the interludes, talking about how he’s had to live some of his most vulnerable moments so publicly, something I spoke about at the beginning of this piece. There is something in those words that, I think, will one day lead to a masterpiece album. This one, unfortunately, isn’t it.
