Justin Bieber - Justice

Pitchfork 72

Read Rawiya Kameir’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

The star has recast himself as a tender humanitarian, which means a civil rights speech shoehorned into an album of anaemic love songs

Justin Bieber’s sixth studio album comes accompanied by a personal statement. “In a time when there’s so much wrong with this broken planet, we all crave healing – and justice – for humanity,” it says. “This is me doing a small part. My part. I want to continue the conversation of what justice looks like so we can continue to heal.”

You can certainly see why he has done this. We’re living through an era when it’s held to be important that pop music tackles – or at least is seen to be tackling – serious issues. It’s not unlike that point in the 80s when even Duran Duran felt obliged to mention nuclear war, lest anyone think that they weren’t agonising over the prospect of mutually assured destruction when not cavorting with models on yachts.

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The Guardian 0

(Def Jam)
Bieber hits a new low with this tone-deaf set of gushing love songs overlaid with the words of Martin Luther King Jr

There’s seizing a cultural moment, then there’s putting one of the greatest orators who ever lived on your album as a tone-deaf wheeze. Justin Bieber’s sixth studio album, Justice, opens with Martin Luther King Jr urging a firm stand against injustice; a later MLK interlude exhorts people to meet society’s challenges with moral courage.

Somehow, Bieber’s takeaway here is a solipsistic, God-bothering set of gushing pop songs about the redemptive powers of romantic love. “I can’t breathe without you,” he sings on Deserve You; “there were times when I couldn’t even breathe,” he adds on Unstable – not out of solidarity with victims of police brutality, but as a metaphor for needing his partner, or as a symptom of anxiety.