REVIEW: Bruno Mars - The Romantic
Frictionless fun
31:34 // February 27, 2026 // Atlantic
When it comes to longevity, Bruno Mars is doing everything right. Since his 2010 feature breakout, he’s remained completely ubiquitous, a background contender for the most successful artist of the 21st century. He’s even been smart about avoiding overexposure, with at least four years between each album since 2012, letting each of his returns be welcome rather than expected. This has all really worked out for him - check out his Spotify page right now, there are five songs with 3 billion streams, and “24K Magic,” “Nothing On You,” “Young, Wild, and Free,” and “Uptown Funk” aren’t even mentioned. As is the case for most massively in-demand entertainment in the 2020s, the ideal strategies are selling nostalgia and smoothing out the edges as you go. Mars has always largely been a safe, old-fashioned artist, but he’s just leaned more and more into that crowd-pleasing identity over the last sixteen years. And comparing the stream counts for “Die With A Smile” with “Fat, Juicy and Wet,” wouldn’t you? At least from an outsider’s perspective, this is the obvious reason The Romantic is his most refined, least defined album yet, a nearly flawless example of smooth nothing.
There’s much to be appreciated about this kind of edgeless music, despite the negative connotations that come with adjectives like that in critical discussions. It’s anything but innovative, but it’s so effortlessly appealing it’s hard to care. The key ingredient in this glossy soup is Mars’s voice, one of the best in his generation. Everything he sings here sounds perfect, each note hitting the exact spot that decades of popular music have trained our collective subconscious to crave. His past performances were technically excellent and largely crowd-pleasers, but still occasionally got so extra that they could get irritating fast on repeat listens. This time around, it’d be difficult to find anyone reasonable who would protest. Gone are the emotionally intense extremes of “Grenade” and the reggae-influenced chug of “Locked Out of Heaven,” good songs with certain elements that really can’t withstand the constant airplay they received. The songs even end quicker and more effectively, TikTok’s impact leading to better resolutions. You, the hypothetical reader who is enough of a pophead to read an obscure review for the latest Bruno Mars album, are extremely unlikely to be bothered by much on The Romantic, even if it gets played around you a few too many times. It’s an exceptionally pleasurable listen.
And yes, that’s all it is. It’s nine well-crafted songs clearly subject to the wills of the pop machine, with involvement from various consistently excellent, well-performing songwriters of this era. These are repeat collaborations for Mars, and for good reason. The machine keeps running because it works. Yes, these songs have little to no distinctive personality, the auditory equivalent of a pleasant, flirty tour guide, but people like that can really make for an entertaining time. The generally accepted notion of a great album needing deep confessions and epic concepts is a modern, very limited idea. That’s not to say that art having personal meaning is a rockist concept, but that rockism has pushed too far on the idea that true art must. For decades, probably centuries, popular music was widely just covers, and The Romantic is so by-the-books it could easily pass for a covers album. If you’ve listened to enough Motown and Santana, you might swear you’ve heard something here before. And just because some boomers writing for Rolling Stone some fifty years ago decided that meant those kinds of records didn’t deserve any acclaim by their emerging standards, doesn’t mean they can’t be just as significant. It is really sweet, fun, and at times quite beautiful. It’s not that this couldn’t be improved by incorporating more personality and individual expression, the lack of those things is conspicuous enough that it detracts from the experience significantly. But a blatantly missing self still can’t keep the love for the classics from shining through all of the artists’ involved very talented hands, and those classics are classics for a reason. They sound wonderful, and so does The Romantic, wonderful enough that fans will likely find their own meaning in it, regardless of how little comes from Mars. That being said, the criticism I’ve heard most regarding this album is pretty much impossible to argue against: why listen to this, when you can just listen to the music it’s so obviously going for? Why listen to Mars doing a perfect Marvin when you can just pull up What’s Going On? Why play artists inspired by War when their whole discography is already on DSPs? I can’t answer that, and neither can Mars. Yet billions of streams will happen anyway, and if you’re one of them, I really doubt you’ll regret it, or even have a mildly bad experience. Every song feels exactly how it should, but that also means you probably won’t remember any of it. The overall consequence of The Romantic’s existence is that many, many listeners will have a pretty nice half hour, and absolutely nothing else.
6.0/10