{"id":412661,"date":"2025-09-10T08:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T08:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/412661\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T08:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T08:20:11","slug":"justin-bieber-swag-ii-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/412661\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Bieber: SWAG II Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tha Carter VI<\/a>. Jaws: The Revenge. Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. Vultures 2<\/a>. The cultural landscape is littered with unnecessary sequels, so it is not exactly an effrontery that Justin Bieber<\/a> has released a follow-up to his alt-leaning SWAG<\/a> less than two months later, but wow, is it a chore to get through. On SWAG II, redundancy is twofold: It tacks on another 23 tracks to the senior SWAG\u2019s already overlong 21, resulting in over two hours of music between the two volumes and very little to say. The novelty has worn off.<\/p>\n

Appealing as it was to hear Bieber adopt the beguiling sonic-stew aesthetic of his collaborators Dijon<\/a> (who\u2019s back to co-produce six SWAG II tracks) and Mk.gee<\/a> (who, as last time, lends his services to just one), it is now clear that Bieber\u2019s take is lite-r in every way. It\u2019s less robust, less intense, less blissfully chaotic. The elements are there\u2014the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber\u2019s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills\u2014but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators (Carter Lang, Dylan \u201cSir Dylan\u201d Wiggins, and Eddie Benjamin are again behind the boards for the majority of SWAG II). Minor distinctions speak volumes as Bieber\u2019s secondhand sound circles back to the gel-slicked textures of its original source material. Try playing \u201cOpen Up Your Heart\u201d alongside Breathe\u2019s 1988 soft-focus adult contemporary smash \u201cHow Can I Fall?<\/a>\u201d; they flow together so well that Bieber is effectively making music that one could peacefully buy adult diapers to.<\/p>\n

On its face, SWAG II is fine in small doses. It is not as ignorable as it is interesting, as Brian Eno<\/a> said about ambient music, but it is pleasantly ignorable. Scrutiny, though, reveals the majority of these songs to be single-sentiment affairs, and many play as sketches. Some have only one verse; \u201cPoppin\u2019 My Shit\u201d features only Bieber on the chorus while Hurricane Chris<\/a> raps a few bars, concluding with the fawning, \u201cOnce I hit, you gon\u2019 get hooked and ain\u2019t gon\u2019 never leave me\/Got some friends and they all love Justin Bieber.\u201d What is this, a cabinet meeting?<\/p>\n

There are odes, perhaps directed to wife Hailey Bieber, though the treacliest, \u201cI Think You\u2019re Special\u201d casts its message of inner peace more generally. It also squanders the presence of Tems<\/a>, who is almost relegated to background vocals. There are sexual slow jams, probably also about Hailey Bieber. \u201cYou got me singing, I, I, oh man,\u201d is some faint praise Bieber offers in one. There are songs about arguments, and in the most scabrous, \u201cPetting Zoo,\u201d Bieber seethes amid a solo-electric arrangement: \u201cI told you that you fuckin\u2019 with a man\/Yeah, I told you I don\u2019t play that shit, no cap\/Bitch, I told you I\u2019m not doin\u2019 tit-for-tat, no\/Don\u2019t make me say some shit I can\u2019t take back.\u201d At least there\u2019s something courageous in being willing to sound like a total prick in public. Even when he\u2019s being affectionate, there\u2019s sometimes an edge. \u201cNobody gets to touch you\/I do,\u201d he sings, hardly the most romantic definition of monogamy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tha Carter VI. Jaws: The Revenge. Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. Vultures 2. The cultural landscape is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-412661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115179029936896225","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}