Justin Bieber‘s new song ‘Heartbreaker’ is here and in it, he lays his cards face up on the table. This is the sad, vulnerable Biebs, which is a change of pace for him, especially since we’re used to him being the cocky, heatseeking missile of pop music. He is The Biebs and everyone loves him. But make no mistake. He is not immune to heartache, and he doesn’t want to be called “the heartbreaker.”
To think that anyone but his high-profile ex Selena Gomez inspired this song would be ridiculous. It’s a melancholy R&B song with spare, stark instrumentation that finds Bieber wishing and hoping against all hope that his ex will pick up her phone and just talk to him.
It’s a rife with regret song and is Bieber at his most serious. While it may be his most honest song, it’s not nearly as catchy as what we’ve come to expect from him.
The song is not dramatic or histrionic — but there is an acute pain.
Mid-song, he delivers a spoken word monologue, which is no doubt from the heart — but the way he speaks in slang and in a lazy “girl, let me holla at you” vibe makes it feel slightly insincere. There’s something about this part of the song that doesn’t quite gel. It sounds like a conversation taking place in a high school hallway, amid lockers, not between a young adult on the cusp of manhood.
He declares: “What I am really trying to say and what I hope you understand / Despite all the imperfections of who I am / I still want to be your man / I know it hasn’t been easy for us to talk with everyone being around / But this is personal, this is for me and you / I want you to know that I still love you.”
Ok, so while the delivery is a bit off, the meaning is there. We hope this melts some of the chill off of Gomez’s heart when she hears it.
The song then rolls into a handclap-driven elegy about not being in contact with her. They don’t speak, and he can’t sleep. It’s heavily processed, and it fades out with light percussion, which mimics a heartbeat, and falsetto.
It feels like JB opened up his journal, found entries from the Selena split period and shared the raw words. It also sounds like he spent some time studying Justin Timberlake‘s laments on heartache.
Listen to Justin Bieber’s ‘Heartbreaker’
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