10 years after the release of his GRAMMY-winning album, 24K Magic, Bruno Mars has returned with a 9-song album full of lukewarm love songs – and there’s a stark difference between the smooth, catchy tracks and the other melodies that just fall flat.
The record has a really rough start, and it contributes to one of the most prominent problems of the album as a whole; there was no clear sound or vision for what the sound is supposed to be. The first two tracks, “Risk It All” and “Cha Cha Cha” are heavily influenced by Latin-pop sounds and then this is never properly revisited.
The third track, “I Just Might,” which came out earlier this year, was a big indicator of how this album made me feel, it’s just alright, but it begs the question, was this the best thing Mars could’ve released after 10 years?
After the first third of the tracklist flew by, the instrumentals did begin to pick up. Taking inspiration from previous projects like An Evening With Silk Sonic (2021) and Unorthodox Jukebox (2012), the rest of the songs did seem like a collection of recycled Bruno Mars songs. However, the nods to his previous music are likely the most interesting and innovative aspect of this record.
“On My Soul,” the biggest highlight of the album, is just classic good-old Bruno Mars. Full of catchy melodies, a great hook and cheeky lyricism. Although “God Was Showing Off,” “Why You Wanna Fight?” and “Something Serious” also prove to be great tracks lyrically, the rest of the LP could’ve easily been written by an AI chatbot. It sounds like a computer was fed a bunch of deep cuts from Mars’ catalog and it regenerated five songs within seconds.
Especially since Mars’ aforementioned ‘Silk Sonic’ collaboration project with Anderson .Paak was his most interesting work to date, this album was extremely promising. It seemed like he rediscovered his initial passion for creating but there is nothing in the concept that reflects this assumption.
Mainstream female pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo have been endlessly ridiculed for not reinventing their aesthetic and sound, yet the male pop stars who continue to create the same half-baked work still receive more praise. At the end of the day, however, any sound that Bruno Mars produces is beautiful and the music is by no means unlistenable. The core issue here is just laziness and the amount of wasted potential this comeback had is plain pitiful.