Now I'm a Belieber

A surprise album is exhilarating.

- By CRAIG JENKINS

SWAG JUSTIN BIEBER.

ILH/DEF JAM RECORDINGS.

The bits we don't need to speculate about seem daunting enough. Bieber's neurological disorder forced him to cancel the remaining dates of the world tour for 2021's Justice, leaving him on the hook for a $26 million advance. The singer sold the rights to his back catalogue—an eyebrow-raising move for anyone under 60, let alone 30—giving an impression of yo-yoing finances as questions about marital distress percolated. Justin and Hailey Bieber became parents last summer, and Dad's Instagram page is an often unnervingly frank document of the joy but also the struggles of his growing family. In the meantime, his past drug use and depression have been trotted back out in the lunacy of the Diddy rumor mill. Having left former manager Scooter Braun's SB Projects, Bieber, moving forward without the executive who first discovered him, feels poignantly unmanaged. He announced his seventh studio album, SWAG, with billboards and sources whispering to magazines about its imminent release; the new music admits that things are far from perfect. It revels in unpredictability, in mix-and-match sounds and sunny moods subject to rain showers. It's exhilarating stuff, music that exists for the enrichment of the artist and not for the sole purpose of being widely, comfortably consumed, though it does not lack commercial instincts.