Justin Bieber - Changes

The Guardian 60

(Def Jam)

Nothing frames a pop album quite like a redemption narrative, and for Justin Bieber this is his second in a row. While 2015’s Purpose, preceded by problems with the police and a much publicised breakup, was full of culture-shifting hits, from the pleading Sorry to the bitter Love Yourself, Changes – created in the midst of health issues and a hasty marriage to model Hailey Baldwin – finds Bieber swapping instant anthems for mid-tempo, trap-adjacent R&B often rendered frictionless by bedroom-centred wedded bliss. So on the tactile Available he coos: “Say I’m number one on your to-do list,” while Come Around Me’s “Do me like you miss me” hook swims around a modern approximation of 90s new jack swing.

There are welcome changes of pace – the rib-rattling Forever featuring Post Malone a highlight – but the tempo drops again for a suite of acoustic sketches that touch on God (the title track), patience (Confirmation) and, on ETA, the joys of online surveillance (“Drop me a pin so I can know your location”). It’s a subdued end to an album that feels like a purely selfish endeavour on Bieber’s part. After years of people-pleasing, perhaps that’s its biggest success.

The Guardian 60

(RBMG/Def Jam)
He’s still one of the world’s biggest pop stars, but this subdued, fitfully lovely album suggests Bieber no longer wants chart domination

Connoisseurs of documentaries that reveal the full horror of becoming famous – particularly at a young age – are currently spoilt for choice. Over on Netflix, there’s Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, a film that makes 21st-century celebrity look like something you’d mete out as a last-ditch punishment: a lonely, exhausting world of constant scrutiny, unending bullshit and dealings with people ostensibly on your side whose commitment to your best interests looks shaky to say the least. Meanwhile, on YouTube, there’s Justin Bieber’s Seasons.

The latter isn’t intended as a cautionary tale. Quite the opposite. It’s a 10-part puff piece, the ruthlessly clear-eyed, non-partisan tone of which can be gleaned from the titles of its episodes: Making Magic, Bieber’s Back. It’s designed to assure all and sundry that its star is recovered from mental and physical illness, and years of drug use that apparently began when he was 13. But an ineffable unease oozes from the screen. If Bieber appears better than he was during the tour for his 2015 album Purpose – during the London shows, he stood miserably on stage, unable to muster the enthusiasm even to mime to a backing track – he still seems fragile and troubled, talking with his head in his hands about the effort it takes him to get out of bed in the morning, explaining how the oxygen chamber he keeps in the studio “decreases anxiety”. “Being human,” he says at one point, “is challenging”.

It feels subdued and unassuming, which are curious things for mainstream pop to be

Pitchfork 45

The popstar returns with a grown-man album about domestic love that has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal.