Justin Bieber – DAISIES

The Song That Leaked From Iceland — And Nobody Could Unhear It

On May 10, 2025, a recording session video and rough audio of “DAISIES” leaked online — two months before Justin Bieber was ready. He had been working at Flòki Studios at Eleven Deplar Farm in Iceland, somewhere between the thermal pools and the silence, and what spilled out onto the internet was intimate, unguarded, and impossible to ignore. When the final version arrived on July 11, 2025 as the lead single from his surprise-dropped seventh studio album SWAG, it was barely different from the leak. He hadn’t needed to fix much. The rawness was the point.

“DAISIES” debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 — simultaneously with the album’s number two debut on the Billboard 200 — and racked up 8,349,340 streams on Spotify in a single day, Bieber’s best ever solo streaming debut. Then it crossed the Atlantic and did something even more significant: on July 25, it topped the UK Singles Chart, becoming his eighth UK number one and placing him level with Oasis, The Rolling Stones, and Sam Smith in the all-time list of British chart leaders. For a surprise-released album that was never designed for top 40 dominance, that was quite a statement.

The song is, at its core, a love letter written in doubt. “Throwin’ petals like, ‘Do you love me or not?'” — the opening line lands like a daisy chain pulled apart one petal at a time. The lyrics chart the history of Bieber’s relationship with Hailey Baldwin Bieber: the separations, the insecurities, the certainty underneath the uncertainty. “You said ‘forever,’ babe, did you mean it or not?” is not a question from someone who doesn’t know the answer. It’s a question from someone who needs to say it out loud. Billboard critic Lyndsey Havens, who ranked it first among every track on the album, wrote that Bieber has never “sounded more real.”

The recording grew out of a new creative circle Bieber had assembled — Dijon, Mk.gee, Carter Lang, Eddie Benjamin, Dylan Wiggins, Daniel Chetrit, and Tobias Jesso Jr. all contributed to the writing and production. Earlier in the year, Bieber had hosted sessions at his Los Angeles home with Lang, Benjamin, and DJ Tay James before moving operations to Iceland for the final stretch. The production — lo-fi, organic, built on chugging guitar and crashing percussion — drew comparisons to Fleetwood Mac from German outlet Laut.de and to early quiet storm R&B from Billboard’s Katie Atkinson. It sounds like neither of those things and somehow both at once.

SWAG — the full 21-track album — was announced the same afternoon it dropped, with only a run of global billboards bearing the single word “swag” as advance notice. It appeared in Reykjavík, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Cambridge, Ontario simultaneously. The album’s number two debut on the Billboard 200 broke Bieber’s run of six straight number one debuts, though its 163,000 first-week units represented his strongest streaming performance ever. A sequel album, SWAG II, followed on September 5. Bieber has since been announced as a headliner for Coachella 2026 — not a bad return for an artist who had been largely absent from solo work since Justice in 2021.

Even Scooter Braun — Bieber’s former manager, from whom he had parted ways acrimoniously in 2023 — publicly called “DAISIES” his favourite song on the album upon its release. That detail alone says something about the song’s disarming power. The New Yorker’s Brady Brickner-Wood summarised what the album achieved around it: “Bieber has never sounded this wild, this expansive, this connected to something true.”

There is a line in “DAISIES” — “Head is spinnin’, and it don’t know when to stop” — that captures something essential about the song itself: it arrived half-finished, from the wrong direction, before anyone was ready, and somehow landed exactly right. Some songs know what they want to be before the artist does. This one leaked from Iceland in May and spent the rest of the summer proving it had always been finished.