Justin Bieber ‘Swag’ Review: Growing Up Is Hard to Do

Justin Bieber’s seventh studio album, Swag, is being billed as a diaristic portrait of the 31-year-old former teen star’s experience as a husband and new father. But aside from occasional flashes of poetry—“Blue sky painted red, sunset look different on you,” he tosses off on “405”—the album, true to its title, serves more as a platform for empty self-aggrandizement than self-reflection.

Swag begins with Bieber doing his best impression of Al B. Sure on “All I Can Take,” accompanied by ’80s-coded keyboards and copious amounts of reverb. It’s hard not to submit to the retro splendor of it all—that is, until the self-pitying navel-gazing kicks in: “These symptoms of my sensitivity/Feels personal when no one’s listening.”

Odes to Bieber’s wife, like the repetitive “Go Baby,” alternate between maudlin and diminutive (“That’s my baby, she’s iconic,” he declares), while “Dadz Love” is an ostensible tribute to fatherhood that has little to say about it besides “Dad’s love” and “Life’s great” ad nauseam. Elsewhere, “Walking Away” is filled with lyrics that even ChatGPT would deem too trite: “You were my diamond/Gave you a ring/I made you a promise.”

There are a few gems in this swag bag, including “Butterflies”—with its infectious blend of shimmery guitars, reverb-doused vocals, and shuffling drum loops—and the Jack Johnson-adjacent “Devotion.” The bass-heavy toe-tapper “Daisies” most successfully embodies the album’s attempted juxtapositions between old-school musicality and modern lingo: “You leave me on read, but I still get the message,” Bieber quips.

At 21 tracks, though, Swag’s featherweight R&B and what we used to call “baby making jams” start to run together. The album is peppered with superfluous interludes featuring comedian Druski, who at one point cringingly proclaims that Bieber’s “soul is Black,” and a handful of half-finished song sketches like “Glory Voice Memo,” in which the singer begs God to heal him. That track and “Forgiveness,” a gospel outro performed by Marvin Winans, feel even more gratuitous, paired as they are with songs espousing the virtues of anal sex and road head.