![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/95aac8c37aba6cd5a9bbaca9ed547beaae-brunomars-2.rhorizontal.w700.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n His new album, The Romantic, plays to the star\u2019s strengths as a time-displaced funk impressionist while painting him into a corner.
\n Photo: Bruno Mars via YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Bruno Mars has been on a mission of late<\/a> to return to his post as modern music\u2019s main supplier for wedding receptions and supermarkets. Following recent team ups with Lady Gaga (the torch song \u201cDie With a Smile\u201d) and Ros\u00e9 (the meet-cute \u201cAPT.\u201d), he\u2019s back with his lush, saccharine fourth solo album, The Romantic<\/a>, leaning into the tightness of the hit-heavy, not-much-changing set list from his Las Vegas residency. In July, rumors swirled that he played the Park MGM for nine years to subsidize gambling debt, which he and the casino deny: \u201cI love the lore that I\u2019m a Las Vegas lounge singer in debt to the mob,\u201d he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/a> in 2024. The Romantic looks to recenter our view of Mars in what he sees as his core contribution to the planet: love songs. It\u2019s still the case that the pop perfectionist\u2019s soul-man routine is by turns both alluringly and frustratingly dialed in to what worked in the past. On this album, he takes a confidently slippery trip into Michael Jackson\u2019s afro period that is hamstrung by the bubbly boilerplate balladry of Mars\u2019s most cloying smashes.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing wrong with wanting to write songs that help people draft marital vows, his idyllic video for The Romantic\u2019s opener, \u201cRisk It All,\u201d supposes. It sees an elderly couple reminiscing about their altar walk and early married life as Mars\u2019s soft vocals are massaged by mariachi horns and bolero rhythms. Honoring the expressive delivery of Mexican bolero and pop vet Luis Miguel and the mewling simplicity of a Bryan Adams ballad, Mars aims for a timelessness that he comes close to while delivering more lover-man clich\u00e9s. In 2010, he\u2019d catch a grenade for you; in 2026, he\u2019d climb, swim, and fly the mountains, oceans, and skies for you. While premiering the album in an iHeart Radio stream hours before its release, he admitted<\/a> to rewriting \u201cRisk It All\u201d \u201cover and over again \u2026 until it felt like love.\u201d He likely intended to highlight how great love songs require time and pain, but what he said implies he endured an agonizing process only to arrive at \u201cIf your heart\u2019s on the line \/ You could take mine.\u201d It\u2019s a beautiful song that\u2019ll get played right where it wants as another spring and summer turns fianc\u00e9s to newlyweds. But it is more refreshing as a stack of noises than a batch of lyrics.<\/p>\n This holds true of other hot spots on the album like the harmonically rich \u201cGod Was Showing Off\u201d or the psychedelic \u201cNothing Left,\u201d capable \u201960s rock and soul jams whose lyrics lean into the same period-appropriate schmaltz of \u201980s and \u201990s R&B ballads that we heard on 2016\u2019s 24K Magic, Mars\u2019s last solo album. What sets all these songs apart from the oldies they reference \u2014 like the percussion in \u201cSerious\u201d<\/a> resembling Santana\u2019s \u201cEvil Ways\u201d<\/a> or the pause before the chorus in \u201cCha Cha Cha\u201d<\/a> clearly nodding to the same section of the 1972 O\u2019Jays heater \u201cBack Stabbers\u201d<\/a> \u2014\u00a0is that Mars\u2019s elders made music to address the moment, not to transport their crowds back to someone else\u2019s. His band is polished and effective but Mars is consistently cruising closely to influences that he coyly avoided naming on iHeart, having been sued repeatedly<\/a> by bands who felt 2014\u2019s \u201cUptown Funk\u201d cribbed from them. (\u201cMusic inspires me,\u201d he told iHeart.) He\u2019s making it known he\u2019d just as soon top charts in 1966 or 1976 as 2026 without getting sued.<\/p>\n The Romantic plays to Mars\u2019s strengths as a time-displaced funk impressionist while painting him into a corner as a lifetime merchant of essentially three strains of song: the<\/a> one<\/a> dripping<\/a> in<\/a> pickup<\/a> lines<\/a>, the<\/a> one<\/a> saluting<\/a> the<\/a> longtime<\/a> flame<\/a>, and the<\/a> one<\/a> wishing<\/a> you<\/a> wouldn\u2019t<\/a> leave<\/a>. But the best genre-jamming exercises here are juxtapositions of sounds that speak to Mars\u2019s history as much as to a vibe that he sees these auditory Hallmark cards as his life\u2019s calling. It\u2019s fair for the guy to feel like a career sentimentalist. He was born with doo-wop music playing in the hospital room at the insistence of his father, Peter \u201cDr. Doo Wop\u201d Hernandez Sr., a singer-songwriter in the Love Notes<\/a>, an a cappella group founded in Hawaii. Mars performed with his dad as a kid<\/a>, adapting his uncle\u2019s Elvis-impersonator act. (A Vegas hotel is not a shameful space for someone who grew up<\/a> miming Elvis, whose career was reborn there.)<\/p>\n On The Romantic, Mars\u2019s throwback wardrobe and mixture of Latin rhythms with rock and soul riffs conjures the New York City his father came up in before settling down in Hawaii, a time when Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix touched the Zeitgeist in Manhattan studios and jazz great Eddie Palmieri saluted the Harlem River Drive<\/a>. This album feels patterned after versatile but concise milestones in funk, soul, disco, psych, and more. Mars wants us to know it took ages to come together. Every gesture screams pedigree. But, basking in the affectations of that pocket of musical history, it wouldn\u2019t hurt to try a song about relations between more than two people.<\/p>\n The Isleys\u2019 Between the Sheets and Wonder\u2019s Innervisions could juggle odes to couples in love with songs about death<\/a> and disorder<\/a>; Little Richard, whose flamboyant showmanship seems like a point of reference for Mars\u2019s sense of style any year, was no stranger to caustic social commentary<\/a>. But as much as The Romantic succeeds at gently contextualizing Mars in its genre explorations, resolving his early fear of being pigeonholed as a Latin artist \u2014 \u201cYour last name\u2019s Hernandez, maybe you should do the Latin music, this Spanish music,\u201d he told GQ<\/a> in 2013, referring to what he\u2019d heard from labels, \u201c\u2026 Enrique [Iglesias] is so hot right now\u201d \u2014 he\u2019s only ever batting around beggin\u2019-music tropes on the mic. He\u2019s just gonna \u201clove you like you never been loved before.\u201d He simply needs to know \u201cWhy You Wanna Fight?\u201d whether you \u201cwant some pretty, brown Bruno babies.\u201d<\/p>\n Funk, soul, and Latin rock are not merely groupings of syncopations, instrumentation, and vocal tics but melodic, rhythmic, and literary traditions that tap on every part of the human experience. Mars pries the social consciousness off, his ambition beginning and ending at the astute emulation of a production aesthetic. So The Romantic often sounds like the past; it\u2019s sweetly arranged, a monument to workhorse soul revues. But its Motown-classic aspirations are thwarted by shrinking from the boldness of its predecessors as Mars aches to be enough of a question mark to transcend differences.<\/p>\n Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n