Beyoncé was on the cusp of 30 when she announced, in early 2011, that she had functionally shitcanned her father and longtime manager, Mathew Knowles. On one side of the gully was 15 years and “Single Ladies.” On the other was, well, you know. Managing her own affairs turned the pop star into an icon. A few years later, Rihanna, at 27, executed a similar self-rescue by establishing her own management infrastructure and released ANTI, an album so singular it made pivoting to billionaireship easier than following it up. Reclaiming control seemed to have fared well for her, too.

I guess what I’m saying is: congratulations to Justin Bieber on his graduation—liberation, even—from the Scooter Braun academy for latter-day pop stars. SWAG, his seventh album and first sans Braun, was released within a day of the news last week that the pair had finally formalized the conclusion of their business affairs with a $31.5 million settlement. (Their personal disentanglement, and those of several other Bieber relationships dating back just as long, have been closely tracked in the form of mutual Instagram unfollowings.) Careful calculus or divine timing? No matter. Turns out that, at 31, Bieber may be in the spring of his own reclamations.

A few weeks before billboards popped up to announce SWAG’s imminent arrival, Bieber got caught up in yet another battle with a scrum of paparazzi. This particular interaction, though, seemed to magnify two of his most enduring public issues: the apparent fragility of his psyche and the complexities of his relationship, as an R&B-singing white boy, to race. He wields a jarring mash-up of two pieces of slang: clock it and stand on business. Though neither is new, both have mushroomed into ubiquity over the past year, reaching far beyond their origins in, respectively, Black and Latine ballroom communities and Southern variants of AAVE. The clip went viral, mostly because Bieber misuses the former—he turns an imperative with an implied you (“clock it”) into a negative present participle (“It’s not clocking to you”)—and his awkward intonation of the latter.

But there are layers even to this. In its correct usage, “clock it” is often accompanied by a hand gesture, in which the middle finger extends to meet the thumb and taps it quickly and emphatically. What few seem to have clocked is that the gesture that has accompanied the phrase’s sudden ubiquity is itself a Bieberesque goof: Across TikTok, the wrong finger tends to tap the thumb. The original gesture has been fully subsumed by its corruptor. Bieber has a knack, however unintentional, for illuminating existing cultural norms by being accused of them.

“It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business” might’ve once necessitated a crisis comms intervention. Maybe a coffee date with his pastor? An Angela Davis book conspicuously poking out of 10-month-old Jack Blues’ diaper bag? Definitely a brief retreat from social media. Instead, the phrase, bungled and cringey, appears proudly in the promotion of SWAG and on the album itself. The flip offers its own kind of control—engaged and conscious, without being overly self-serious. It’s postmaxxing as catharsis, and Bieber has spent months perfecting it on Instagram. I imagine the chaos alone would have covered his previous handlers in hives.

SWAG is similarly unconcerned with legibility or linearity. As a declaration of independence, it shares with ANTI a longing for warmth, retreat, and full-body exhalation. For most of its 50-plus-minute runtime, Bieber appears, finally, entirely unencumbered. Collaborators Carl Lang, Eddie Benjamin, Dylan Wiggins, Tobias Jesso Jr., Daniel Chetrit, and Dijon help him architect a kind of unnamed freedom: Here he is carried forth by a sturdy, magnificent bassline; buoyed by a jungle-lite drum pattern that tethers without dropping anchor; defended by the fortress of his own voice—sampled, distorted, and looped.

As ever, Bieber’s primary mode is R&B, expanded in some directions by the power of gospel and contracted in others by the expedience of pop. “Daisies” and “Devotion”—among the album’s standouts, and its closest to traditional singles—calibrate all three, swapping out the lacquered surfaces he’s historically glided over with ease for the warped, yielding palettes often associated with collaborators Dijon and Mk.gee. For a change, Bieber joins the production instead of catapulting over it. Such is life, he seems to conclude, negotiating with himself in service of marriage, parenthood, and family.

Also for a change: Multiple decades of R&B influences exist in harmony, integrated. On “Daisies,” he questions (“You said, forever, babe, did you mean it or not?”) and promises (“If you need time, just take your time/Honey, I get it, I get it, I get it”), hinting at the swing of a Bad-era Michael Jackson. “Devotion,” featuring Dijon and with a co-write from gospel-trained Daniel Caesar, shifts into a sexy that recalls the held tension of D’Angelo’s “Untitled” and Beyoncé’s “Rocket”—updated with the cry of a harmonica. I challenge you not to detect a loving nod to SWV in opener “All I Can Take,” or to Stevie Wonder, DeVante Swing, Sisqo, and even Solange elsewhere across SWAG.

When Bieber dissociates into safe territory, alongside rappers Gunna, Sexyy Red, and Cash Cobain, on a trio of totally adequate but otherwise impersonal, paint-by-numbers R&B love songs, the specter of an algorithmic Spotify playlist looms. Still, he is at his most emotionally absent, and the album at its most frustrating, when Druski interrupts on a couple of skits. The comedian, who in his own work ping-pongs between charming and daft, is ostensibly recruited to offer support, counsel, cultural context, and stealth promo for Black & Mild Cigars. That Druski is frequently credited with popularizing “standing on business” does not, however, work as a legitimizing detail; instead, it introduces a cynicism that clashes with much of Bieber’s ethos on SWAG and threatens to undermine the entire thing. In response to Druski’s, frankly, stupid assessment that “Your skin white, but your soul black, Justin, I promise you, man,” Bieber is wise enough to offer a curt “Thank you,” and nothing more. Unfortunately, he is not yet wise enough to have dispensed with the idea altogether.

But Bieber’s haecceity as a pop star, and SWAG’s animating force, is that still-undeniable voice. He aerates midtempo opener “All I Can Take” with percussive breaths that inevitably recall Michael Jackson, and winks, coy and pitched-up, on “Yukon,” a highlight despite sounding like it could’ve originated as a demo by Drake, Frank Ocean, Ed Sheeran, or some twisted combination thereof. “Dadz Love” is an enigma and, improbably, a rousing one: A breakbeat praise break, punctuated with affirmations from Lil B and cherubic interjections from Bieber, who turns a declarative “It’s dad’s love” into an existential question “Is that love?” and back again. These moments, SWAG’s riskiest and most unexpected, are its most rewarding. The pair of acoustic sketches “Glory Voice Memo” and “Zuma House,” disarmingly vulnerable in prayer and supplication, may seem the furthest afield. But for longtime Beliebers, both will echo grainy videos of a preteen Bieber busking on the steps of the Avon Theatre in his hometown of Stratford, Ontario: eyes to God, guitar in hand, desperation pouring out. There he is!

After a good decade of holding a constant posture of apology for wrongs mostly self-inflicted and long ago eclipsed by those of peers blessed with far less scrutiny, Bieber himself remains an obstacle to new audiences who might otherwise find themselves compelled by this version of him. In an era that feels dominated by disaffected, hardhearted men, Bieber is overwhelmed with emotion and propelled by unselfconscious yearning. In a culture that feels utterly bereft of grace or generosity or even possibility, Bieber seems to glimpse some. SWAG feels as much about what he has let go as it is about what he is seeking to become: a pleasing lover, a cheerleading husband, a believer so desperate for heavenly forgiveness that he cedes the mic to Marvin Winans for the album’s closing prayer-in-song. Who among us wouldn’t love to go in peace?