If To alter represented Bieber’s sweaty anthem to the calming joy of marriage, Justice it is the sound of that personal triumph gaining depth and detail, which is why it is ultimately more effective. Wide-ranging hymns like the soft guitar ballad “Off My Face” and the trop-pop training “Love You Different” allow Bieber to exalt his romantic joy, but deviations like “Unstable”, an emo-pop contemplation about personal insecurities alongside the Kid LAROI and “Peaches”, a silky smooth summer jam alongside Giveon and Daniel Caesar, help to vary the list of songs and to avoid monotony.
As he has done throughout his career, Bieber sells lyrical approaches with his vocal seriousness, making the listener buy when he is urgently begging, as well as when he is slipping on a falsetto. An audio interlude by Martin Luther King Jr. delivering a sermon entitled “But If Not” – which ends with the line “You died when you refused to defend justice” – does not work in the context of the album, a misstep with the best of intentions. But even so, Bieber dives with a feverish commitment to the next track and keeps us engaged.
This track is titled “Die For You”, features Dominic Fike, and is immersed in the touch of the 80s: the maximum cheese synthesizers, the strong drums, the post-chorus drop beat, the way Fike stutters a few lines as if he trying to join a cover band for Knack. Bieber visualized that retro sound on the recent single “Hold On” and charges his best points over Justice, with producers like Skrillex and Watt helping him to perfect the pose; the approach is totally successful, just as Purpose 2015 flirted with EDM – also with Skrillex as a critical co-pilot – and gave Bieber the biggest hits of his career. A song like “Somebody”, simple in its elevation and undeniable in its overwhelming flourishes of production, could very well be unleashed on the top 40 radio stations and deliver the same kind of enduring vibes that The Weeknd recently achieved in its success After hours.
In the five years between Purpose and To alter, Bieber continued to score big singles thanks to a prolific period of collaborations, andTo alter, songs like “Holy”, “Lonely” and “Anyone” – they all appear in Justice – became the top 40 basic products. Amid expectations of a commercial downturn, Bieber more than proved his credentials as a trusted success maker. Now, he is starting to become a stronger album artist, whose non-singles on a track list are as crucial as the radio feed. Bieber gains more artistic clarity in Justice, while he tries to express a complex emotional state over the course of an album instead of improvising in three minutes. There have been countless iterations of Justin Bieber The Pop Superstar, but he is spending time helping fans understand who he is and where he is going, and the result is his strongest end-to-end hearing.