Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Sep 8, 2025Moments of quaint inspiration and insight are few and far between. In the mire of an album experience intended to present Bieber as spirited and multi-dimensional, you instead get an artist spread thin; anonymous, distant, too often bloviating across a bloated runtime.
-
Sep 5, 2025It’s frustrating because there’s plenty of great material scattered across these two parts, which would be far stronger as a single, shorter release.
-
Sep 10, 2025The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators.
-
Sep 8, 2025Swag and Swag II come nowhere close, but within these 40-plus tracks are 10 songs that would have made a genuinely surprising statement from Bieber. Instead, they’re buried beneath a heap of blandly samey songs with nothing much to say.
-
Sep 5, 2025Swag II is everything the original wasn’t: slick, anonymous, half-assed, playing depressingly safe. Out of 23 songs, there’s maybe 5 or 6 keepers, buried in way too many duds that drag on forever at 3 minutes.