Justin Bieber is a dad. He’s a husband. You’re not getting it. It’s not clocking to you. It’s not clocking to you that he’s standing on business, is it? He doesn’t give a fuck if you’re on the sidewalk! He’s a human fucking being! You’re standing around his car! At the beach! You know what Justin Bieber is saying? You don’t think he’s a real fucking guy, do you? You’re going to take this video out of context. You’re going to say he’s mad. Justin Bieber doesn’t know who the fuck is paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the fucking one, OK? Stop provoking him. He’s a real dad, a real husband, a real man, so don’t fucking do this shit to him, OK? He’s not to be fucked with. He doesn’t know who’s paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk. He doesn’t care what kind of dirty work, what kind of nasty shit — you’re getting paid in the background to provoke him, bro, but he’s really not the fucking one. He’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk, bro.
It’s Justin Bieber’s biggest hit in years, honestly, and it’s not a song. The video in question is only a few weeks old, and it’s strangely compelling, not just for the way Bieber messily employs one particular Black expression but for the sense of feeling in it. Bieber is all wrapped up in a blue hoodie that looks a bit like a blanket an emergency worker give you in after rescuing you from a flood. He speaks directly to the camera, which means that you, the viewer, get the strange sensation that Justin Bieber, global pop superstar, is yelling directly at you. He’s not, of course. He’s yelling at the paparazzi, a dance he’s done a million times before. On his face, you can see some combination of rage and panic. He knows he’s about to go viral for this, but he can’t help himself.
The “standing on business” video follows a troubled few months for our guy Justin Bieber. He’s been trying to stay out of the public eye, and it hasn’t really worked out. Justice, his last album, came out a little more than four years ago. It was a hit, though not as big a hit as some of his earlier ones. He canceled much of his tour behind that record, citing exhaustion. For a while now, he’s been posting cryptic social media messages and dealing with speculation about his mental and financial health. A recent TMZ special claimed that he sold his catalog because he was broke and concern-trolled about a self-destructive spiral. The “standing on business” video was roundly mocked online in all the familiar ways, but it suggested that Bieber was teetering on the edge of something. Maybe he was. But now, with an out-of-nowhere surprise album, Bieber has done something truly unexpected. He’s made his Folklore.
You remember Folklore. Five years ago, with COVID reshaping the world, Taylor Swift released a set of downbeat, intimate songs, mostly recorded with the National’s Aaron Dessner. In the process, she rebuilt both her sound and her public image. Bieber and Swift emerged as teenage pop-star sensations around the same time, but they’ve never had much in common, and they’ve generally given off the impression that they don’t much like each other. (Their respective fan armies sure don’t.) Bieber’s version of pop stardom is massively different from Swift’s, and he’s at a very different place in his life. Also, Swag is nowhere near as good as Folklore. Still, the parallels are there.
Consider: Bieber enlists help from his favorite indie cult-hero types to make a relatively quiet, lo-fi record that puts a very different filter on the type of music that he was making the last time that we heard him. He addresses his own public narrative directly, with the full understanding that his audience will get the references. He makes something that only really sounds raw and experimental because of the person who made it, and then he releases it mid-summer with only a few hours of warning. Bieber’s version of the pandemic is his own public spiral, and his version of the National is Dijon. It’s different, but it’s the same, too.
They saying Justin Bieber dropping To Pimp A Matcha Latte
— armon (@armonsadler) July 10, 2025
Throughout Swag, the online personality Druski makes a bunch of appearances. Those bits sound like they were recorded on a phone, or excerpted from a livestream that never went public. When he arrives, Druski tells Bieber, “Your skin white, but your soul Black, Justin, I promise you” — the kind of thing that a guy like Justin Bieber lives to hear. Bieber quietly thanks him, and then demurs when Druski offers some of his Black & Mild. Later on, a theme emerges: Druski really wants to smoke a blunt with Bieber, and Bieber doesn’t want to. (Druski’s wet, hacking on-mic cough could have something to do with his refusal.) Later on, Bieber tells Druski, “I have had to go through a lot of my struggles as a human, as all of us do, really publicly. And so people are always asking if I’m OK, and that starts to really weigh you me, you know?” A few minutes later, Druski lightly roasts Bieber for the way he delivers the phrase “standing on business” in that video — a sign that we’re hearing all of this in something like real time.
We’re not. Bieber has been working on Swag for a while. The title is another kind of sign — a four-letter flashback to the moment, right around 2011, when online stars like Lil B and Odd Future were chanting that word over and over. Bieber got into it, and then he got sick of it. Way back in 2013, Bieber told the world that “swag” was dead and that everybody had to stop saying it. Nobody actually says “swag” on Swag, but the feeling is there. The album shows Bieber retreating to a certain comfort zone. Swag is a weed-gummy album, a record of softly enveloping tenderness. It’s Bieber’s first album as a father, and it’s also the first that he’s made without mega-powerful industry figure Scooter Braun overseeing his career. He finally has the freedom to make something warm and gooey, and that’s what he’s done.
I’ve already seen online theories that Def Jam released Swag today specifically to distract from Let God Sort Em Out, the comeback album from disgruntled ex-Def Jam act Clipse. That’s funny to consider, and I’m sure at least a few executives are congratulating themselves. But Clipse and Bieber are in completely different universes, and Swag does not sound like a work of behind-the-scenes machinations. It feels like it was made by someone who uses music to cope and who has not had an easy time coping lately. There are no obvious radio hits and few commercial concessions on Swag. Bieber made the entire thing without Poo Bear, the longtime co-writer who helped him craft most of his biggest songs. Even when rappers show up on Bieber’s Swag tracks, they don’t sound stapled-on, the way they have on virtually every Bieber record since the Jaden Smith days. Reportedly, a more conventional Justin Bieber pop album is supposed to come out later this year or early next year. I hope we don’t get it. I prefer this version of Bieber, the one more focused on vibes than hits.
The Mk.gee thing has already been overstated. Last year, a New York Times profile mentioned that the young guitar wanderer was working on new Bieber music, and that combination captured imaginations. Mk.gee is officially credited on exactly one Swag track: “Daisies,” where he’s one of six co-producers and eight co-writers. It’s entirely possible that Mk.gee played guitar on more than just that one song, since his thick, watery tone is all over the record, but we don’t know that yet. Before Mk.gee became a big-deal solo artist last year, he was best-known as a collaborator of Dijon, the woozy R&B auteur. Dijon is all over Swag. Often, the record sounds like Bieber giving Dijon and Mk.gee’s spaced-out, underwater treatment to the ’90s R&B that he loves so much. It’s a remarkably smooth and friendly sound, and it’s closer to latter-day Bon Iver than I would’ve ever expected Justin Bieber to come.
Bieber dropping his first new album in four years with <10 hours notice is surprising enough, but it making me go "hmm yeah it *has* been way too long since I listened to How to Dress Well's 'What Is This Heart?'" is downright jaw-dropping
— AUgetoffmygold (@augetoffmygold.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 7:15 AM
Bieber has nodded in this direction before. Roughly every other Bieber album is a for-the-heads R&B excursion that’s not necessarily made with pop-chart dominance in mind, and Swag fits neatly next to Journals and Changes on that score. But Swag has a more cohesive, lived-in feeling than either of those. Bieber made much of it with what appears to be a stable core of collaborators. Tobias Jesso Jr., the former indie artist who became a for-hire songwriter, has his fingerprints on much of the record, and so does real estate scion Daniel Chetrit. SZA collaborators Carter Lang and Sir Dylan worked on just about every track, and I have to imagine that her diaristic stream-of-consciousness approach was a major inspiration.
When Bieber pitches his voice up to sing about pulling up in the Phantom with the roof gone like Jimmy Neutron on “Yukon,” he even sounds like SZA. 2 Chainz is on that song, but he doesn’t rap; he just mumbles ad-libs in the background. Lil B plays a similar role on “Dadz Love,” a song that I was dreading on title alone. I didn’t have to worry. It’s just a soft breakbeat, a few muffled Fender Rhodes chords, and Bieber singing either “dad’s love” or “that’s love” while the Based God speechifies about how people need to get along better. It’s quite pretty. Lots of this album is quite pretty.
“Dadz Love” sounds less like a song, more like a sketch, and there’s a lot of that on Swag. Bieber’s most impressive vocal on the record might be on “Glory Voice Memo,” a murky and unfinished half-song seemingly recorded directly onto a phone. Many of the tracks dissipate into the air before any structure emerges. There are some bad ideas on the record, and it could’ve definitely used an edit even though the 21 tracks drift by in a not-unreasonable 54 minutes. Nobody needs the skits. Nobody needs Sexyy Red bulldozing onto the gentle sex-jam “Sweet Spot,” talking about “put that dick in my ass, make my heart stop.” (Gunna and Cash Cobain’s verses work much better, since both of them sing almost as tenderly as Bieber.) When Bieber plugs his wife’s phone-case line — “That’s my baby, she’s iconic, iPhone case, lip gloss on it” — it comes off like something that she wrote and told him to say. Bieber is a remarkably graceful singer who makes dumb decisions all the time, both in his public life and in his music. In a record as soft and gossamer as Swag, the dumb decisions stand out more.
I’m pointing out the places where Swag doesn’t work, but I mostly like it more than I thought I would. With this record, Bieber makes a big leap, and he only stumbles a little on the landing. The actual songs are baggy and blurry, but they float pleasantly. Taken together, they play out as a sustained mood-piece made from a distinct perspective. I was not into the idea of spending my Friday processing and reviewing a new Justin Bieber album, but my hostility melted away when I actually heard the thing. This is not the album of the year. It’s not even the best album out today. (That’s still Clipse.) But it’s a moment of blissed-out peace from a man who has spent his entire post-adolescent life at the center of the whirlwind. That’s worth something. I wanted to dismiss it, and I can’t. Justin Bieber is a real dad, a real husband, a real man, so don’t fucking do this shit to him, OK?
Swag is out now on Def Jam.
