When it rains reigning male pop superstars, it pours. The boys are back in town, and two of the three or four biggest guys in the recording business, Bruno Mars and Harry Styles, are coincidentally releasing albums on back-to-back weekends, as if teaming up to storm the barricades mostly held in recent years by pop’s girl bosses. So it’s interesting to see what these two alphas are bringing along as stylistic arsenals in their attempts to reassert some dominance, or at least parity. Coming next week is Styles’ intriguingly titled “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally,” and we’ll find out soon enough whether Harry means to use the D-word there literally or just figuratively.
But for Mars’ first solo album in 10 years, “The Romantic,” it is as if disco never happened. It is a time machine back to the mid-1970s, just before dance music took over, with a heavy, heavy emphasis on retro-soul balladry. The album ends with a song called “Dance With Me,” but it’s a song dedicated to slow dancing, just like the surprisingly slow-simmering track that opens the album. When the pace does get upped a couple of times, it’s to bring us up to the tempo of the O’Jays, not to snap us back to the time of J. Cole. There’s not a moment on the whole nine-song collection that sounds like it was minted any more freshly than 1976. It’s already been well-established that the album’s first single (and one of its few bangers), “I Just Might,” reminds folks a little of Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” which came out that year. So, truly, here, Mars is Bicentennial Man.
Given how unhappy many people are with 2026, a trip headed exactly 50 years back into the past will be a welcome ride for a lot of hitchhikers. But will you ultimately find “The Romantic” compelling as anything much more than a mood ring… er, mood piece? The best predictor for that will be how much you loved or liked “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” the similarly throwback album Mars put out with Anderson .Paak four and a half years ago. (How time flies when you’re arresting it!) Paak has moved on, but Mars is remaining committed to the bit — really, really committed. It takes some nerve, after a full decade of not putting out a solo album, when that last solo record was a Grammy winner for album of the year (“24k Gold”), to return with something that is completely beholden to styles that went out of fashion before you were born. But it’s slightly less nervy if you think of it more in terms of sticking with the formula that last brought you an album-sized smash. This is “Silk Sonic II,” for most intents and purposes.
I am part of the target audience for “The Romantic,” as an admitted nostalgist who thinks the 1970s was a golden era for just about everything but gas lines. But I’m also not part of the target audience, inasmuch as I don’t prefer the homages to past eras to be completely hermetically sealed, without even slight nods to what has transpired since, let alone an attempt to bring them a little bit into the future. I think “The Romantic” is actually better than “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” in several quantifiable ways, including its bold emphasis on ballads, where you really get to hear Mars test what he can do with those pipes, which is a lot. And there’s something even craftier about how well he, his extremely talented co-producer, D-Mile, and his band, the Hooligans, have replicated the exact feel of a great era in record-making. But, among these two albums, it does have the disadvantage of coming second. The album is great as a stunt, but, slightly refined or not, it’s the second time in a row doing what amounts to the same stunt. You can admire his ability to reverse-engineer the cool sounds of his forefathers, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be moved by it.
Especially when, once you get past admiring the encyclopedic knowledge of ’70s flourishes, you realize there’s not really much in the way of great songs here. Nearly everything sounds like a possible candidate for a followup single to “I Just Might,” but nothing jumps out as the pick. There’s actually a decent amount of sub-genre variation from song to song, but emotionally, it’s kind of a flat-line, with the most perfunctory lyrics you will hear on any album this year. There never seems to be even a remote possibility that Mars is telling us anything about his real life amid all the fill-in-the-blank cliches (“The fire don’t burn like it used to, girl”; “Let’s go to the moon a little later / Hope your wings get to fly”; “Turns out you don’t need a rocket ship, no / To find your own shooting star”). So, in the age of hyper-autobiographical pop, “The Romantic” feels weirdly and completely impersonal, unless you consider extreme pastiche a personality. It’s like a fun costume party where you never find out who actually attended. Although, to be fair, Curtis Mayfield is a hell of a mask, right?
One thing that’s kind of interesting, though, is a Latin current that ebbs and flows through a few pieces of the record, starting with the album cover itself, which features hand-written lettering that is meant to remind oldsters of a golden age of Chicano rock. The first couple of tracks seem to be headed toward a concept album in that direction. “Risk It All” is the aforementioned kick-off that really does feel like a bit of a risk, not just because it starts off the album on a slow, pleading note with acoustic guitar plucking and some of Mars’ most supple vocals. There are horns through a lot of the record, but in this number, they’re played as mariachi horns. (It also has arguably the album’s most vapid lyrics — “I would swim across the sea just to show you / Sacrifice my life just to hold you,” et al. — but never mind those.) He ups the Latin quotient with the tenser rhythms and strings and congas of the second track, “Cha Cha Cha”; maybe the title is a giveaway. (On the non-Latin tip, it also interpolates Juvenile’s’s 2004 “Slow Motion,” a nice combo.) But these Latin flavors turn out not to be a constant through the rest of the album. They do return in one of the most up-tempo tracks, “Something Serious,” a fairly direct cop of “Oye Como Va,” which is fun until you start thinking about how the chorus is not that special and you’d rather be listening to “Oye Como Va.”
After the third number, “I Just Might,” snaps you to attention with its booty-shake-or-go-home machismo, the fourth, “God Was Showing Off,” is when it really settles into the groove where Mars is most comfortable these days, bridging the gap between Motown and Philly soul. “Why You Wanna Fight?” almost sounds like a parody of some of these genres, with a backing chorus repeatedly and dramatically cooing whyyouwannafight as a single word, in-between the singer’s more extenuated phrases. “On My Soul” and “Nothing Left” bring in some welcome electric guitar licks. Most of the tracks that follow will make you think of the kind of vintage Top 40/AC soul where it’s summertime and the listenin’ is EZ.
Overall, it’s an album that seems designed to be background music, which is not entirely meant as an insult; there’s an art to making music that can be put on at literally almost any party and suit the tastes of grandmas as well as kids, and serve that function for a couple of years or more. But if you were planning to foreground “The Romantic,” this one may have a more limited shelf life. As a leisure suit of a record, this is not really album-of-the-year material, like “24K Magic” was. It’s not even meant to be that kind of tour de force, to be fair, but it’s also probably not meant to be quite this in-one-ear-and-out-the-other. How can vocals be as bountifully impressive as Mars’ are here and still leave you thinking that there’s no lived experience in any of the songs?
This really is a “romantic” album, but what’s missing is the sensation that the material has any tangible connection to actual love. Unless love for early Kool & the Gang counts.
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