Once again, global superstar Justin Bieber has released an entire album of lo-fi chillwave R&B with very little advance notice. Two months ago, Bieber returned with Swag, the most adventurous and sonically cohesive album of his career. Swag came out of a series of jam sessions with new and old friends, including adventurous indie types like Dijon and Mk.gee, and apparently those jam sessions were even more productive than we realized. Just yesterday, Bieber announced a new album called Swag II through a series of billboard advertisements around the world. Now, that album is out.
Swag II didn't arrive at midnight last night, the way albums usually do. Instead, it hit streaming services at around seven this morning. It's an extremely long album, with 23 songs, along with all of Swag added on as a bonus. The new record fits the same sonic template as the first Swag, and Bieber brings back many of the same collaborators, including Dijon, Mk.gee, and Tobias Jesso Jr. James Fauntleroy and Mike Will Made-It also get songwriting credits on a couple of tracks.
Lil B, who showed up to give some motivational talk on one Swag song, is back to play hypeman on "Safe Space," a pretty good house-adjacent track about how Justin Bieber will be your safe space. Like the last record, Swag II ends with a couple of nakedly religious songs. (This time, it ends with an endless eight-minute spoken-word reverie about the Garden Of Eden.) Throughout the album, Bieber is once again in dazed, expansive wife-guy mode.
There are differences, though. We don't get any comedy sketches on this album. The songs are less concerned with Bieber's various tabloid flame-outs, though he does take a minute to note that his haters are now singing along and tapping their feet. (He's not wrong about that.) Bieber sings duets with Nigerian star Tems, UK indie-soul singer Bakar, and Eddie Benjamin, an Australian artist who has writing and production credits on many tracks from the LP. Most intriguingly, Hurricane Chris, the Louisiana rapper who made one big hit with "A Bay Bay" in 2007 and who's mostly been gone from the public eye since then, trades bars with Bieber on a song called "Poppin' My Shit." This raises many questions. How did that happen? Have Bieber and Hurricane Chris been friends ever since the 2008 Kids' Choice Awards or something? Have they just been waiting for the right moment to collaborate? Will Kid Twist show up on Swag III?
Swag was a huge out-of-nowhere surprise, a free-wandering and exploratory album from an artist whose music has almost always been sleek song-machine pop. Swag II is more of a companion piece, Folklore to the first record's Evermore, and it doesn't have the same shock of discovery. But on first listen, there is some really, really pretty stuff on this. Right now, my favorite is "Eye Candy," which has gloriously blissed-out PM Dawn vibes that not even the dumb lyrics can kill. Once again, Bieber's voice sounds soft and tender and fantastic. Once again, it's fascinating to hear him in this mode. I wouldn't put this music up against Baby, the masterful record that Dijon released between Swag and Swag II, but the world feels like a slightly more interesting place with this record in it. Stream it below.
Swag II is out now on ILH Productions/Def Jam/UMG.
