Sometimes in life we all overswag. Two months ago, Justin Bieber shocked the world with his excellent Swag , his first album in four years. It was the artistic comeback he needed—sweet validation after all his celebrity meltdowns, troubling headlines, paparazzi battles, and social-media disasters. So there’s something perfect about Swag II — after catching everyone off guard before, he’s immediately back with the lame album everyone expected last time. He could have called it Swag And It’s Completely Different And Not Very Good But Also Still Swag .

The first one was a deeply weird personal statement, from an artist going through six kinds of it. But Swag II is everything the original wasn’t: slick, anonymous, half-assed, playing depressingly safe. Out of 23 songs, there’s may

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