Nate Sib: Reborn

0.0

0.0

Reader Score

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Genre:

Pop/R&B

Label:

Republic

Release Date:

2026

In the late 2000s, young boys loved to cringe at Justin Bieber. Maybe they were secretly jealous of his perfect voice, his hair flips, the way his oh-oh-ohs sent girls swooning. Maturing was realizing his music wasn’t inherently repellent; some haters converted with the aching downtempo R&B of 2014’s Journals, others took until the slanted acoustics of last year’s SWAG tapes.

Nate Sib was a tween when Bieber released 2015’s Purpose, an EDM-laced burst of diaristic rambling; today, the 22-year-old songwriter cites it as key inspo. On his debut album, Reborn, Sib casts himself as a new troubled and thirsted-after pop idol who’ll seduce you with sly taunts then shower you in soul-uplifting affirmations. He’s got the angelic vocal runs, compelling flaws, and cracked dance producers of his hero, but lacks the vision and chutzpah that would make his songs genuinely exciting.

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Sib grew up around music—his dad was in the punk band Wax, while his mom did makeup for rappers like Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg—but didn’t start taking it seriously until 2023, after some encouragement from his longtime friend 2hollis. While 2hollis had already spent years tunneling into the underground, amassing a cult fanbase and his own mini-genre, Sib started his career without his friend’s baggage or niche knowledge. For most of Sib’s short career, he has played the role of aloof sidekick. Two EPs hinted at the sweet potential of a guy who combines Adam Levine hook science with distorted digicore; his most hypnotic tunes were lithe and angular, dressing his voice in lightweight baubles of synth and rushes of bass plucks. 

Reborn is Sib’s first attempt at a complete solo statement. It’s split across two modes. The first half is soundtracked by clubby pop with a few flashes of weirdness; it follows an aura-hogging prince who tells girls they could be his “future baby mother.” Sib is more insecure and gracious than a typical male manipulator; he only gets mad when a girl lies to him, and even then, he just says, “Your problem, baby.” He professes his Abercrombie & Twitch aspirations on “Face Card,” whose cutely propulsive house beat has the flattened gleam of a face polished by a zamboni. “Love Love” successfully hurls together fat subs, dubstep growls, and uber-clean devotion pop, making something just tweaky enough for the complextro kids and just safe enough for a startup launch party.

The fuckboy shell falls off in the second half, in which Sib opens up about overdosing on fentanyl when he was 17. The smoky whimper of his voice conveys some of the pain, but he doesn’t have the writing chops to pull off motivational ballads; his words are rarely more original and compelling than what you’d find by Googling “emo aphorisms.” “I swim underwater when I wanna hide,” he sings on the slow-burning sobriety story “All I Needed.” “Too many faces, too many eyes/I already judge myself enough.” The sentiments are raw, but he sells his own agony short by deploying ran-through platitudes like, “In a room full of so-called friends/But you might still be alone.” Singing with the wounded warmth of the redeemed and the cliché tone of a youth pastor on the last track, he urges a kid to never feel alone because, “You’re a child of love, you’re a child of god.”

The songs teem with inventive beatmakers—Olswel, 2hollis, Loukeman—known for ecstatic pyrotechnics and halcyon sweetness, but you wouldn’t know it unless you checked the credits. Sib diverts their jagged and tasteful impulses for beats any mall-pop producer could churn out. In theory, it’s a cool idea to tap brostep and mad-rap wizard kimj for the heart-on-sleeve “All I Needed,” but the melodramatic keys and limp, ponderous drums don’t make any use of the producer’s erratic edge. The stomp-clap-hey-perpop really only works on “It Ain’t Easy,” where Sib shrinks into a little kid who feels lost in the scary adult world, conveying his distress with simple lyrics about wanting someone to hold his hand.

Reborn spends too much time gesturing at messy human contradictions, leaving us with only a hazy outline of hurt and redemption. The cozy weighted blanket of Sib’s swirling entreaties and the acoustic guitar on “Too” is weighed down by chirrups about how “polaroids are photographs that hold the days.” Bieber inspo leaks out of “Sexiest” and “Shooting Star,” where Sib tells a woman that she’s beautiful, she’s the sexiest he’s ever seen, she deserves the world, she’s a shooting star, and other cloying dollar-store compliments. Bieber was a new kind of popstar, a boy-wonder-turned-deviant who made trashy and bizarrely intoxicating music as he hopped across genres and matured in the spotlight. Sib only offers a pastiche of this innovation, without any of the idiosyncrasy that spawns a hook about a girl’s lips hanging on him like Ziploc. The alt-pop scene is so thronged with eccentric upstarts these days, maybe it seems like the freshest, most radical thing to do is chase sterility. But if this is the best that latter path has to offer, I’ll stick with the freaks.

0.0

0.0