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Bruno Mars wasn't part of the Super Bowl Halftime Show earlier this month. It wasn't a big deal. Nobody expected him to be there. Mars has already starred in a couple of past Halftime Shows, and his participation in this one would've felt pretty random. But Bad Bunny's big, theatrical performance did include Lady Gaga singing a salsa-fied take on "Die With A Smile" at a Puerto Rican wedding. Only in retrospect did it occur that Gaga's duet partner on that song is both (1) half-Puerto Rican by descent and (2) the greatest wedding singer in recent pop history. A Bruno Mars cameo might've thrown the whole narrative off, but it might've also been the most thematically appropriate thing that could've happened.
Weddings are Bruno Mars' thing. His songs go off at weddings. Mars got his start doing Elvis and Michael Jackson impressions for crowds of tourists in Hawaii, and he has taken that sensibility with him to the big time. There's a distinct and recognizable Bruno Mars sound, but that sound is an elastic pastiche of other sounds that tend to do well at weddings — Motown high-steppers, pleading Philly soul fantasias, smoothed-out funk, starry-eyed disco, precision-tooled new wave, anything else that might get the party started without getting so rambunctious that somebody's aunt says that she's going to call it a night. He's a one-man tribute act, and he can get away with singing nothing but originals because his originals continue to keep the wedding-band industry afloat. "Uptown Funk!" alone has probably kept plenty of semi-professional horn players in linen and polyester.
Bruno Mars has never seemed remotely interested in presenting himself as an artist. He's a craftsman, a nightclub entertainer who headlines stadiums, a traditionalist who dabbles in lots of traditions. So it's weird that Mars somehow went just shy of a decade without releasing a solo album. That is artist behavior. Mars has done plenty of tinkering with side projects like Silk Sonic, his duo with Anderson .Paak, and with Vegas residencies and what have you, but he has not released music under his own name in a very long time. That's weird. Here's what's not weird: Mars' new full-length The Romantic, which finally ends that dry spell, only offers slight variations on the Bruno Mars formula. He's here to give you exactly what you expect, more or less, and he's still pretty good at it.
Bruno Mars could do more. We know this. He doesn't collaborate with other artists all that often anymore, but whenever he does, you might catch little glimpses of what he could do if he wanted to push himself. "APT.," the gigantic global hit that Mars recorded with the Blackpink member Rosé in 2024, is a joyously fired-up piece of cheerleader-chant power-pop, and it's one of the best things that he's ever done. There is absolutely no trace of that on The Romantic. There's a trace of something else, though.
When he first jumped into the pop game 20 years ago, Bruno Mars insisted that he did not want to be known as a Latin artist. That's why he goes by "Bruno Mars" and not "Bruno Hernandez." Over the years, Mars has been dinged for appropriating historically Black sounds and fashions, though it's hard to say what traditions should ideally inform the work of a Jewish/Puerto Rican/Filipino musician.
Mars never really played around with any form of Latin music until the opening seconds of The Romantic, when "Risk It All" kicks off with flourishes of bolero guitar, strings, and trilling mariachi horns. When Mars starts to sing, he leaves aside all Morris Day funky-flirt affectations and goes straight into sincere Latin balladeer mode. The video goes heavy on Mexican cultural imagery, too. After playing in the same sandboxes for so long, Mars seems to use his album opener to announce a whole new career phase.
Within a few tracks, though, we learn that "Risk It All" is a bit of a fake-out in the same way that lead single "I Just Might," a perfectly solid paint-by-numbers Bruno Mars lite-funk singalong, was a bit of a fake-out. There are traces of Latin pop all through The Romantic, but those traces remain slight. "Cha Cha Cha" finds Mars singing Juvenile lyrics over a percolating clave rhythm. "God Was Showing Off" starts with a Spanish count-off, and its version of '70s soul leans on Salsoul just as much as Philadelphia International. "Something Serious," my early pick for the best song on the album, fully jacks its groove from "Oye Como Va," both the Tito Puente and Santana versions.
But The Romantic is not Bruno Mars' Latin pop album. It won't be his Latin pop album even if he releases a Spanish-language version, which would not surprise me one bit. Bruno Mars simply does not do that kind of career reinvention. That's not who he is. A new Bruno Mars album is not a grand artistic or personal statement. Instead, it's like when you wake up and your phone updated overnight and now the app icons are slightly different shapes. This time, the app icons are slightly more Latin-shaped, but it's still the same phone. You're not getting a new phone. You will never get a new phone.
Bruno Mars knows how to do the thing that he does. He recorded The Romantic with the same team of collaborators that he's been using for many years. The album works in conversation with the old records in Mars' collection, not with anything that might be happening in the pop music realm today. Mars puts songs together with Max Martin levels of mathematical precision. You can hear all the care that went into his productions — the crisp precision of every breakbeat, the timing of every horn-stab, the tone on every guitar solo. His voice remains fantastic, though even his most passionate ad-lib runs still feel like simulacra. Mars will never dig deep into his soul. Instead, he will skim across the surface like a stone. It's the thing that he does.
But that surface-skim thing becomes a bit of an issue when Mars tries to convey sincere passion, and that's mostly what he does on The Romantic. 24K Magic remains Mars' best album because it's the most playful and because he's more believable tossing out Leisure Suit Larry pickup lines than pledging eternal devotion. But if The Romantic has a theme, it's monogamous love, baby. Bruno Mars is back in the wedding-song business. He's singing ballads again. "Die With A Smile" was just the starting point. It's been a while, but Bruno Mars is back to reassuring you that you're perfect just the way you are.
There are a couple of fun, flirty songs on The Romantic. Even there, though, Mars is less into wiggling his eyebrows at you, more into telling you that he's gonna love you like you've never been loved before, even implying that the word "love" might not be pure innuendo in this case. "The Romantic" also goes harder on sincere puppydog-eyes slow-dance numbers than anything that Mars has done since Doo-Wops & Hooligans. He's pretty good at writing that kind of song, and I'd rather hear Bruno Mars singing wedding ballads than Alex Warren or whoever. But I can't feel the ballads on The Romantic in the pit of my soul.
The Romantic is fine. Often, it's even pretty good. The album is a supremely easy listen. Like every Bruno Mars LP, it's extremely short, which is a great favor to those of us who have to turn around reviews quickly. When these songs enter CVS overhead-speaker rotation, they will fit right in. I have already had my first orthodontist's office waiting-room encounter with "I Just Might," and it sounded like it had always been there. But right now, there's a whole world of elite-level pop stars who keep pushing because they want to feel alive and because they want you to feel the same way. Bruno Mars could be one of them. He could lead. He's got all the talent and charisma to make something special. He doesn't want to. Instead, he'll keep singing his wedding songs.
The Romantic is out now on Atlantic.
English (US) · 