{"id":503863,"date":"2026-02-27T21:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T21:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/503863\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T21:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T21:29:08","slug":"bruno-mars-the-romantic-review-youre-better-off-listening-to-the-songs-hes-blatantly-imitating-bruno-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/503863\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruno Mars: The Romantic review \u2013 you\u2019re better off listening to the songs he\u2019s blatantly imitating | Bruno Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is 10 years since Bruno Mars last released a solo album. An eternity in pop music, and yet you\u2019d struggle to describe the follow-up to the umpteen-platinum 24K Magic<\/a> as eagerly awaited: not for reasons of snark, but simply because the world has hardly been starved of Bruno Mars in the intervening decade.<\/p>\n

With Anderson .Paak, he co-piloted Silk Sonic\u2019s hit album An Evening with Silk Sonic. He variously collaborated with Cardi B, Gucci Mane, Sexy Redd and Ed Sheeran. Die With a Smile, 2024\u2019s soft rock duet with Lady Gaga went on to become the most streamed song of last year. Meanwhile, he also recorded the most globally successful song released in 2025, the infernally catchy APT., with Blackpink\u2019s Ros\u00e9. There have been two world tours, two Las Vegas residencies, the opening of his own Vegas bar, an appearance on online game Fortnite and the 2026 ambassadorship for Record Store Day.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t fault him for his industry, but it means that The Romantic doesn\u2019t carry the big swing of a grand return. That hasn\u2019t stopped its lead single I Just Might reaching No 1 in 11 countries (it\u2019s currently lodged in the UK Top 10, surrounded by artists who were still schoolkids when 24K Magic came out), either despite, or perhaps because of, its resemblance to Leo Sayer\u2019s 1976 hit You Make Me Feel Like Dancing. You can scoff at that as a profoundly unhip reference point if you want, but as the TikTok ubiquity of Edison Lighthouse\u2019s Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes or Chris Rainbow\u2019s dimly recalled 70s soft-rock track Be Like a Woman proves, we live in a world where long-held notions of what\u2019s hip and what\u2019s not went out of the window some time ago.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As it turns out, resemblances to old songs are something of a hallmark on The Romantic, an album that takes a lot of its cues from Silk Sonic\u2019s update of the soft soul peddled by the Chi-Lites and the Stylistics 50 years ago: Why You Wanna Fight? in particular could have slipped on to the Silk Sonic album without causing a jolt. You don\u2019t have to be an expert in musicology to spot the influence of Curtis Mayfield\u2019s Move On Up during On My Soul<\/a> or of the O\u2019Jays\u2019 Backstabbers on Cha Cha Cha: there\u2019s a point during the latter where the music stops dead and it\u2019s hard to stop yourself involuntarily crying \u201cwhat they do?\u201d in the manner of the 1972 Philly soul hit, just as it\u2019s a struggle to not start singing Tito Puente\u2019s Oye Como Va over the intro of Something Serious. God Was Showing Off is deeply reminiscent of Barbara Acklin\u2019s 1969 classic Am I the Same Girl, or, if you prefer, the instrumental version, Soulful Strut by Young-Holt Unlimited (even if you think you don\u2019t know either, you\u2019ll immediately recognise the horn line from a TV ad for Vision Express). The lyrics are also familiar \u2013 there ain\u2019t no mountain high enough, and he just called to say \u201cI love you\u201d.<\/p>\n

Glaringly obvious musical references have hardly harmed anyone\u2019s chances of having a hit in recent years, least of all Bruno Mars<\/a> \u2013 APT. was so indebted to Toni Basil\u2019s Mickey that the writers of that song got a credit \u2013 and the references here are so glaringly obvious, even to a young fanbase, that they avoid the charge of sneaky borrowing: there\u2019s nothing sneaky about it, so it must be a heartfelt homage. You\u2019re left in no doubt that Mars is a really talented performer \u2013 listen to his voice soaring on closer Dance With Me \u2013 and has great taste in music.<\/p>\n

The real issue with The Romantic is that its highlights are the songs that sound like songs you already know. Better to have Something Serious\u2019s Latin-influenced slink than the ho-hum balladry of Nothing Left, or opener Risk It All, a runny 70s MOR ballad not much perked up by the addition of mariachi horns. And even the blatant homages are not good enough to prevent you thinking you may more usefully spend your time listening to the originals.<\/p>\n

Instead, Mars and his co-writers just dump well-curated influences \u2013 from the umpteen classic soul signifiers in the songs to the Jimi Hendrix-y headband Mars sports in the cover illustration \u2013 without bothering to rearrange them into something new. It\u2019s perfectly pleasant, but for all the effort that has clearly gone into crafting it, this is fundamentally lazy songwriting. Is that really the way you sell 150m records? Apparently so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is 10 years since Bruno Mars last released a solo album. An eternity in pop music, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-503863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}