It’s tempting to say The Romantic, the fourth studio album from Bruno Mars and his first solo work in a decade, sounds like it was made by AI. That seems to be a constant and unavoidable criticism these days, especially when it comes to any piece of art that scraps together an amalgamation of previously used ideas and plops out soulless, overly polished slop. “I Just Might,” The Romantic’s lead single, dealt with such a claim when it was released a couple months ago, with listeners commenting on the song’s derivative, blandly algorithmic energy. Even if AI wasn’t used, it does feel like something Mars cobbled from stuff he’s done before and fed through a machine that’s been wired to create the most generic wedding party song of all time. It’s got all his signature trademarks: a midtempo beat; brassy, disco-inflected instrumentation; several attempts at beckoning and seducing a woman like a cartoon wolf trying desperately not to bust.
That formula worked more successfully at the beginning of Mars’ career, back when his passionate, earnest romantic gestures and his charming, old-school showmanship made him a radio and chart-topping hit. But as the trends of the 2010s started to dissolve with the advent of the 2020s attention economy, Mars’ shtick has gotten a bit sad and desperate. No matter how long and successful his Las Vegas residency was, or how committed he and Anderson .Paak were in making and promoting their 2021 retro-fetishistic pastiche An Evening with Silk Sonic, the throwback slickness of Mars’ heyday doesn’t really have the same luster it used to. Nonetheless, he remains undeterred, as The Romantic continues his penchant for the stylings of a bygone era, this time adding a Latin rock flair to his R&B-pop template. But without .Paak’s crispy swagger to flank him, Mars is left with little to work off of and the result is nothing but more pastiche, and a pretty tedious and empty one at that.
Aside from Mars’s exuberant, rent-is-due crooning, the nicest thing that can be said about The Romantic is that it’s only nine tracks long and clocks in at just a little over 30 minutes. Even then, though, the majority of the songs are too dull and unmemorable to sustain themselves, as they cycle through the sounds and themes of Mars’ past and that of his influences to copy-paste levels of laziness. 24K Magic may not have been an amazing record—it certainly wasn’t deserving of the Album of the Year award over much more relevant LPs like Lorde’s Melodrama or Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.—but its ‘90s funk ambiance, corny as it sometimes was, at least gave it more variety, personality, and audacity (and also inspired a pretty funny YouTube Poop remix and produced a genuinely catchy one with Cardi B).
Conversely, The Romantic can be summed up best as music for miscellaneous uncs who can no longer shoot poison. It’s the harassment part of the flirting vs. harassment meme, with Mars acting obsessive to an aggravating degree in his relentless endeavor to score attention, forgiveness, sex, or all three from his suitors. Despite the fervor in his voice and the live-band vibrancy of his production, no amount of sentimental balladry (“Risk It All,” “Nothing Left”), endless vamping (“Cha Cha Cha”), Santana imitation (“Something Serious”), or Marvin Gaye pantomiming (“Why You Wanna Fight?”) can disguise the repetitive, unimaginative quality of Mars and his collaborators’ songwriting. “On My Soul” might be the one positive outlier on The Romantic with its groovy, squealing guitar hook and lively horns, but the lack of specificity in his lyrics immediately stifles it from ever fully taking off.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to expect Bruno Mars to do something different when he’s never reinvented the wheel so much as dedicated his entire being to paying homage to it. However, since we’re living in a time that’s already so inundated with and dominated by nostalgia, an homage is simply not going to cut it if it has nothing new or interesting to offer. And Mars is too broad an artist and too eager a crowd-pleaser to create a refreshing spin on old tricks. If anything, The Romantic is an incredibly fitting but unfortunate title for an album by an artist who can’t help but romanticize the past. Mars has always seemed a little more in love with the act of performing than the substance of what he’s performing—he was, after all, discovered as an Elvis impersonator as a kid—but that kind of rigid devotion to replicating the classics over making new ones can only go so far before it morphs into glaring self-parody. It makes sense, then, why Mars has gotten the AI accusations: The Romantic repurposes the aesthetic of his inspirations, but not their heart and soul.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
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