Friday, April 12, 2024

Justin Bieber - JB6 (2021)

After releasing his fifth studio album, 'Changes' in 2020, Justin Bieber was interviewed by Apple Music DJ Zane Lowe, and said that he wanted his next record to reflect the things that he had learned about commitment and building trust. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Bieber was in quarantine at his house in Toronto, he was sent a plethora of demos submitted to his management team by songwriters, managers, publishers and producers. He recorded the songs he liked in his home studio and sent them back to his inner circle, and work on what was to become the 'Justice' album intensified once he got back to Los Angeles a couple of months later. While his last album was R&B oriented, for this record nothing was off limits, and by December 2020 he had amassed at least an albums worth of material, and so by January 2021 he was able to announce on Twitter that he was going over the track listing for the album. He finally announced the release of the album on 26 February 2021, and along with that announcement, an EP titled 'JB6' was released for digital download and streaming. The EP includes the original versions of three of the already-released singles -  'Holy' (featuring Chance The Rapper), 'Lonely' (with Benny Blanco) and 'Anyone', as well as acoustic versions of the former two. 'Justice' dropped on 19 March 2021, and was a decent addition to Bieber's catalogue, seeing a return to his pop roots, and being distinguished by a variety of modes that includes vaporous synth-rock and strumming acoustic ballads, hip hop gospel and bedroom EDM, and sun-dazed R&B and contemporary Afrobeat. Since the release of the album, a number of unreleased songs have surfaced, with some of them carrying on the R&B sound of 'Changes', while others sound more like out-takes from 'Justice', so I've gathered up the best of them, and added in a couple of out-takes/rarities from a few years earlier if it felt like they fitted, to make up a companion album to 'Justice', named after, and featuring two acoustic tracks from, the 'JB6' EP.    



Track listing

01 Hit The Ground
02 Double Negative
03 Holy (Acoustic) (feat. Chance The Rapper)
04 No Pain
05 Long Way Home
06 Over & Over
07 Swag Mean
08 You And Me (feat. will.i.am)
09 Lonely (Acoustic)
10 Change The Weather
11 No One
12 Unconditional
13 I Wanna Be (feat. Nasri)
14 We Were Born For This

I'm no Bieber expert, but I did later discover that a few Youtube posts were not actually him, such as 'Raise The Bar' (actually 'My Reasons' by 3in) and 'Letter To A Broken Heart' by Zion Foster, so if any of these are not really Bieber then can you let me know.  

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