Is SWAG the apex or the nadir of Justin Bieber’s Generational Run? This is the question that we are begged to resolve of the sixth album from our eternal boy wonder. It is no secret that the Biebs has been in mind-bogglingly great social media form in 2025, wresting control of his Instagram from his team to unleash a deluge of stream-of-consciousness content, most of which is soundtracked by fantastic music (ranging from Drakeo the Ruler to Adrianne Lenker), a lot of which is just golf. He has also been caught on camera, more than once, presumably unintentionally, madly invoking a certain Mr Krabs logic to skewer the photographers and reporters who mercilessly follow him around LA. And this all very publicly cleared a path for one of the great internet videos of all time, It’s Not Clocking To You That I’m Standing On Business, Justin Bieber’s ultimate anti-paparazzi treatise, the capstone of a life’s work.

Justin Bieber has been on top of the world at least two times before. His adolescent rise to fame after releasing the gets-better-every-time-you-hear-it single ‘Baby’ culminated in such withering ubiquity that he could confidently claim that Anne Frank herself would have been a Belieber. Unsurprisingly, this incident precipitated his first fall from grace. But he was back once again in 2015 with a disgustingly successful run of number one hits (Where Are Ü Now into What Do You Mean? into Sorry into Love Yourself) and a surprisingly memorable Comedy Central Roast. Still, it doesn’t feel like the general public has ever been quite so in thrall with Justin’s every move as they have been this year. This leads me to conclude that for all the fame, the teenage delirium, the world domination, all that has come of Bieber’s fifteen years in the spotlight, only now has his Generational Run truly arrived.

This is not lost on Bieber. His new album, SWAG, is transparent in its opportunism, featuring a number of interludes which garishly sample his paparazzi speeches and which find Justin in conversation with Druski, the Hood’s Hottest Comedian. Moments like these do little to hide the fact that Bieber has likely been sitting on the bulk of this record for a minute now, waiting to cash in on a wave of virality. This realisation threatens to expose the artifice of what we might call the Justin Bieber Project 2025, the one that maybe wasn’t so spur-of-the-moment, that might have instead been cynically confected by his PR team to rethrone Bieber in the pantheon of modern popstars. And this raises the possibility that perhaps, with the release of his actual art, the Generational Run has concluded.

On the other hand, this is probably the best album Bieber has made to date. SWAG pulls inspiration brazenly from the recent music of Mk.gee and Dijon – who is a prominent collaborator on the record – which is to say it wanders between warbling guitar rock, glowing synth pop, and gospel-tinged R&B. It has a quiet, indulgent feel to it, playing more like a low-stakes passion project than a capital-P pop album. Much as it is an important milestone in the timeline of Justin’s Generational Run, SWAG is unlikely to go down in the history books as an ‘era’ for Bieber. It just sounds like a record he made because it’s simply what he wanted to make and because he has more than enough millions to splash doing it. He probably has hours of uncommercial material like this in the vault that won’t ever see the light of day: DS2-style Atlanta trap, Christian worship music, Spanglish reggaetón, use your imagination.

The music on SWAG is good without being great. You can only expect as much from music that imitates a pre-loved sound this faithfully. Some sounds stick their head above the parapet: the swooning neo-soul of ‘DEVOTION’, the sashaying lite-funk of ‘ALL I CAN TAKE’, the hurried sexy drill of ‘SWAG’. Mostly, though, each instrumental settles into an elegant enough pocket and then stays out of Justin’s way. Years ago, that might have been a dangerous prospect, but it makes for the right environment on SWAG. With the album’s production in the hands of trusted, reputable characters, Bieber is given the freedom to shape each track on pure intuition. The word that most often comes to mind when I listen to SWAG is thoughtless, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense.

SWAG’s songs follow the path of least resistance. Bieber’s lyrics are unexamined, his cadences are riffed, his melodies are meandering and untraceable. The album often follows a logic that must only make sense to Bieber himself. ‘YUKON’ is pure nonsense and yet it’s one of Bieber’s most captivating songs since 2015: “In the Phantom with the roof gone / I pull up like Jimmy Neutron”. That’s a non sequitur, right? But “roof gone” is such a thrillingly giddy way to describe a Rolls-Royce that any rhyme automatically justifies itself. The track pitches Bieber’s voice up to helium heights, giving the impression that the song is being playing inside his head, little melodic ideas colliding with unfinished bars that leave only one tangible thought in their wake: “What would I do if I didn’t love you, baby?”

That baby he refers to might be God – Bieber devotes a number of tracks on SWAG to the Most High, including the stunning electrified hymn ‘GLORY VOICE MEMO’ – but is almost certainly his wife, Hailey. Justin’s unyielding affection for Hailey brings out his inner crooner, which results in some feverish vocal runs all over the record and two particularly infectious highlights. One is the unlikely duet ‘SWEET SPOT’, which finds Bieber and Sexyy Red in their feelings over a radiant throwback synth pop beat. Both of them channel their love through sex, though Bieber manages to leave much more to the imagination (“Just give me anything to eat like it’s a sweet shop!”) than Red does (“Put that dick in my ass, make my heart stop”).

The other one is ‘TOO LONG’, a glittering cosmos of soupy R&B for Bieber’s vocals to expand and glide through. It’s just gorgeous, so much so that Bieber must have felt entitled to one outrageous line in which he fully submits to his libertine fantasies: “Keep on stroking my ego while you’re stroking my”… fill in the blank. For a few reasons, the song reminds me of ‘Purple Hearts’, the Kendrick Mr Morale joint that features Summer Walker, and when I think about it now I feel like Bieber is a bit of an avatar of Walker’s. Walker has always possessed natural hip hop bona fides while making sublime pop and R&B, while Bieber has spent his entire career chasing rap credibility even though he owes his superstardom to a mainstream pop audience.

Reconciling his place in those two worlds has always proved elusive for Bieber, though on SWAG you can hear him continuing to try. It’s worth reiterating just how obnoxious those interludes are: like, it’s one thing to get Druski to tell you in conversation that “your soul is black, Justin… you more than 2 per cent” – and I’m sure Bieber was overjoyed to hear that – but it’s another thing entirely to earnestly broadcast that endorsement on your album, as he does on ‘SOULFUL’. For all the viral success that Justin has enjoyed in the lead-up to SWAG, it plays like he’s still nervous about where he fits in the culture, still anxious to lock in co-signs from the personalities he looks up to. And at the end of it all, the motivating question remains: released in his finest hour, does SWAG amount to a moment of pride or indignity for pop music’s walking contradiction – our walking contradiction, really – Justin Bieber? I’d deign to say it’s a little bit of both.

73

Sam Gollings

17 July 2025