‘Swag’ Album Review: Justin Bieber Finds His Old Soul

In 2007, back when YouTube was in its infancy and Justin Bieber was not far beyond his, he and his mother posted to the platform a series of videos of him singing covers. Mostly, he gave preternaturally tender versions of R&B hits — Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” Brian McKnight’s “Back at One,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (!) and more. (There is also 40 seconds of “Justin Bieber playing the djembe” for the curious.)

All of these videos remain on Bieber’s YouTube channel and the spirit captured in them has remained in his music, even if at times it has appeared to be shoved into the back seat and told to remain quiet while the adults were talking.

By the dawn of the 2010s, he was a pop phenom, and a couple of years after that, he was the most successful male pop star of his generation. The more successful he became, though, the more his connection to R&B was pared back. “Journals,” his 2013 EP of lo-fi soul, became a connoisseur’s favorite, but didn’t reorient his trip to the pop stratosphere. On his biggest hits — especially the 2015 pair “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean?” — his voice, and how it was filtered, was more eau de toilette than eau de parfum.

A decade has passed since then, and Bieber has spent long stretches of that time in a kind of public retreat. He’s had big hits, and he’s toured big rooms, and he’s been an object of tabloid scrutiny and public speculation about his mental health; largely, he’s been a superstar seeking a shadow.

“Swag,” Bieber’s seventh studio album, which was released with almost no advance notice last week, is a winning example of an older artist — though, at just 31, it feels lightly ludicrous to refer to Bieber this way — being willing to toss much of the old playbook away, or at least obscure it really well. It is an album of spacey, sometimes slithery soul music — some of it highly digitally manipulated, some of it refreshingly acoustic — that feels like a reversion to Bieber’s core passions refracted through the lens of a performer who has seen too much.

The low-pressure environment of this album is tactile — Bieber sings in a variety of modes, he collaborates with unexpected peers, he has standard-length songs and also snippets and skits.