Bruno Mars is back, releases his new solo album 'The Romantic', & announces new tour

Its been too long (10 years) but our favorite Filipino-Puerto Rican superstar, Bruno Mars, is back in the driver’s seat after dropping his fourth solo studio album, The Romantic.

For the Asian American community, Bruno has always been a point of immense pride. Seeing a Pinoy face dominate the global stage isn't just about the music; it’s about the representation he brings to every "uptown funk" beat and "versace" slide.

Born and raised in Hawaii to a Filipino mother and Puerto Rican father, Mars' new album leans into his Latino roots with the use rhythmic accents of boleros, mariachi, and salsa. Released on February 27, The Romantic is already being hailed as a masterpiece of "modern nostalgia."

While the whole album drips with soul, three tracks stand out as his most direct tribute to those Caribbean and Latin rhythms:

"Cha Cha Cha": will most likely be a favorite among Filipinos who love get on the dance floor with the cha-cha. The most rhythmic of the bunch, this track trades the usual 808s for a mellow salsa percussion section, creating a groove that feels like a backyard party in Spanish Harlem. Rolling Stone notes it even cleverly interpolates hip-hop vibes into its tropical swing.

"Something Serious": This is where Bruno channels his inner Carlos Santana. It’s a percussion-heavy jam that Stereogum says "jacks its groove" from the legends of Latin rock and boogaloo, putting the cowbell and brass front and center.

"Risk It All": The album opener sets the stage with dramatic mariachi horns and bolero-style vocals, reminiscent of the legendary Luis Miguel. It’s a grand, cinematic nod to the "romantic" ballad tradition of his Puerto Rican roots.

A return to soul

Here’s a track-by-track breakdown of the other six songs inThe Romantic. recalling the vintage soul sounds he’s mastered over the years.

The lead single, "I Just Might," didn't just climb the charts—it teleported straight to No. 1, proving that the world was hungry for that signature Mars magic.

Here are the other cuts and what the critics (and the fans) are saying:

"I Just Might" – The record-breaking lead single is a quintessential, bubbly funk anthem that feels like an instant classic for the dance floor.

"God Was Showing Off" – A standout "sweet soul" ballad that Billboard describes as a dreamy, two-chord groove reminiscent of the Philly soul era.

"Why You Wanna Fight?" – This pleading R&B track showcases Mars’ most raw, emotional vocals yet, with raspy harmonies that some are comparing to The Weeknd.

"On My Soul" – A high-octane, sincere pledge of commitment that picks up the pace with manic electric guitar and undeniable physical joy.

"Nothing Left" – A poignant, piano-led lament that echoes his earlier hits like "When I Was Your Man," complete with a distorted, soulful guitar solo.

"Dance With Me" – The album closes with a cinematic, 60s-inspired slow dance that leaves fans swaying under "twinkling stars."

Bruno Mars' new album has influences from his Latin and Blues roots

Breaking records

When the tickets for his 2026 "The Romantic Tour" went on sale, the internet didn't just slow down; it nearly broke. Produced by Live Nation, the tour saw a frenzy that surpassed even the biggest stadium runs of the last decade.

Mars set a new industry benchmark for the most concert tickets sold by a solo male artist in a single 24-hour period, moving over 2.1 million tickets on the first day of sales. Taylor Swift holds the record with $2.4 million in the first day for her The Eras Tour last year.

Mars' staggering number eclipsed records previously held by pop icons, proving that Bruno’s "staying power" is less of a slow burn and more of a wildfire.

Mars is serving as the 2026 Record Store Day Ambassador, releasing a limited compilation titled "The Collaborations" on April 18, featuring his hits with artists like Lady Gaga and Rosé.

Hitting the road

The tour kicks off on April 10 at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas—fitting, given his long-standing residency history there. What makes this run special for us is the "pamilya" feel of the lineup. He’s bringing along his Silk Sonic partner Anderson .Paak (performing as DJ Pee .Wee) and soulful openers like Victoria Monét, RAYE and Leon Thomas.

From London’s Wembley Stadium to the massive Rogers Stadium in Toronto, the world is about to get a masterclass in showmanship. For a kid who started as an Elvis impersonator in Waikiki, this isn't just a comeback; it’s a coronation.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. 

The Filipino American legacy of fighting for freedom is taking on Trump

Filiipino American caregivers are applying lessons from resisting authoritarianism under Philippine dictator Marcos Sr. in the 1980s.

WALTER ABAYOYONG / CREATIVE COMMONS

Filipino Americans join one of the No King's rally in Los Angeles.

By Jasmine Mithani

Republished with Permission from The 19th. This piece was published in partnership with The Xylom, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on global health and environmental disparities.

LOS ANGELES — Nurses, labor organizers and survivors of a brutal dictatorship are banding together to apply lessons learned from anti-authoritarian organizing in the Philippines to the present-day United States.

Political activist Myrla Baldonado became one of the “forced disappearances” under Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., in 1983. She was kidnapped by state agents, swept away to a secret location, tortured and then imprisoned for two years.

She sees echoes of what she experienced in the United States today. But she has hope that nonviolent protests, like the No Kings rallies, can enact change the same way they did in the Philippines. Nearly two million people marched down Epifanio delos Santos Avenue, or EDSA, in 1986 to protest against the Marcos regime. The disgraced dictator abandoned his office and fled to the United States.

“The lesson is that dictators fall. I mean, since time immemorial, this happened, from Nazi Germany to what happened during the ESDA Revolution and many other dictators. You all fall down,” Baldonado said. “It’s only a matter of time that they do.”

She wants people who are despairing or mired in hopelessness to know that the more cruel those in power become, the harder more and more people will fight back.

Joe Arciaga, a nurse and veteran, is the driving force behind bringing the No Kings rallies to Historic Filipinotown, a residential enclave west of Downtown Los Angeles. He wanted to link local activism with national pro-democracy movements, and founded the Filipino American Lakas Collective in 2025. Through that, he pulled together the rallies in Unidad Park in June and October. Now he’s gearing up for round three, in March.

Lakas — “strength” in Tagalog — is new, but it joins a rich network of community groups that have been organizing for civil and labor rights for decades. Led by advocates for Filipino health care and domestic workers, many of whom are single women new to the country, they have mobilized to support their community as violent Immigrations and Customs Enforcement actions increased across the city.

At the rallies, titos and titas handed out water and freshly baked pandesal, reminiscing of when their legs were strong enough to march all the way to City Hall. American and Philippine flags were interspersed with signs equating President Donald Trump with former Philippine leaders Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte.

California is home to 40 percent of the nation’s Filipino Americans, and the Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to the largest population of Filipinos outside of the Philippines.

The long arm of American imperialism played a role in these current demographics. The Philippines was an American colony until 1946. During that time, nursing schools were built and maintained by the colonial government. When immigration quotas were abolished in 1965, it became easier for Filipinos to immigrate to the United States, and many women nurses were encouraged to do so as the Marcos administration sought to grow the economy with diaspora funds.

At home, the democratically elected Marcos prolonged his presidency and concentrated power through martial law beginning in 1972. That spelled danger for activists like Baldonado, who started protesting against the Marcos administration when she was in college. She continued her activism for over a decade, cutting contact with her family for their safety and going by a different name. But in 1983, government agents grabbed her from a library. Baldonado became one of the regime’s “forced disappearances,” held in a secret location and tortured. After a couple weeks she was transferred to a jail, where she was imprisoned for two years. Baldonado was free but still recovering from her ordeal when the People Powered Revolution overthrew Marcos in a mostly bloodless uprising in 1986.

At the No Kings rally in June, she brought red carnations and passed them out to the attendees.

“No one believed we could bring down Marcos without bloodshed,” Baldonado said later in an interview. “The flower was a symbol of that, the urge for people to do it in the nonviolent way and to deescalate.”

Baldonado’s American chapter began in 2006, when she immigrated and took a job as a home care worker. The conditions were untenable: She experienced verbal abuse and sexual harassment, and her pay averaged only $5 per hour.

Baldonado began organizing for better working conditions for caregivers and domestic workers, first in Chicago and then across the nation. Her work was honored by the Obama administration.

Now, she works as the director of community engagement at the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, continuing to advocate for care workers. Many of the people she works with are middle-aged single women who immigrated from the Philippines — similar to her story.

In the new Trump administration, the center has been hosting immigrant rights trainings and supporting detained Angelenos. Baldonado sees the hopelessness overtaking people in the wake of rising violence from the state, but she believes change will come through people-powered action, just like it eventually did against Marcos.

“We want them to see that there is still a glimmer of hope, despite all the difficulties that we are having right now,” she said. “History has shown that dictators don’t remain forever.” Baldonado knows that intimately.

At the No Kings rally in October, Jollene Levid climbed onto a park bench and read off the notes she had just finished compiling on her phone.

“We are here today as Filipinos, Filipino Americans, as immigrants, workers, communities of color to remind Trump that this is not 1565,” she cried.

JOE ARCIAGA

Jolene Levid (center) spoke at the No Kings protest.

“We Filipinos will never bow to a crown — from Spain to the Imperial Japanese and American colonizer, to Donald Trump and his cronies, we say NO KINGS!”

Levid had not imagined herself speaking to a crowd. But her mentors, the women who taught her how to build collective power, instilled in her the necessity of translating revolutionary ideas to everyday language.

Like Baldonado, Levid has dedicated her life to the power of collective organizing. Since college she knew she wanted to work with unions. She started organizing as an undergrad, but something felt out of place in those activist spaces: “Women’s issues were always secondary,” she said. “It was almost like always an afterthought. But my experience growing up in an immigrant family as the eldest daughter I knew was always informed by my gender, my sex.”

When she went to an event hosted by a feminist collective in college, everything clicked into place. Now her political home is AF3IRM, a feminist group fighting imperialism around the world. She has served on the leadership of the national organization and is active in the Los Angeles chapter.

AF3IRM has been active in local communities, protesting ICE as well as American intervention in Venezuela and Iran. “We’ve been hitting the streets and organizing new women to join us,” Levid said.

Levid’s family is from north east Los Angeles, one of the most concentrated areas of Filipino Americans in the country, and she still lives there today. But her day job as an organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles takes her all over the city.

She has always chosen to work for unions in fields dominated by women. Education and health care are some of the largest sources of overseas Filipina workers, and they wield power differently. “When those women workers strike, the facilities can’t work without them,” Levid said. “Filipino women have been instrumental in these types of labor fights.”

Levid has been busy in 2026, as 94 percent of the teachers union she works for voted in favor of a strike if benefits negotiations stall out.

Levid’s advocacy for workers took a new tack in 2020. After her aunt, Rosary Castro-Olega, became the first health care worker in Los Angeles County to die during the Covid-19 pandemic, Levid dedicated herself to documenting the deaths of Filipino health care workers.

She was part of a group that scoured obituaries to create Kanlungan, a digital memorial. Their data work laid the foundation for future studies that found Filipinos made up a disproportionate amount of nurse deaths during the first year of the pandemic. The numbers are stark: 4 percent of nurses in the United States are Filipino, but they accounted for 26 percent of nursing deaths during that time.

Her work drew the attention of Arciaga, who co-produced “Nurse Unseen,” a 2023 documentary about the history of Filipino nurses and their caregiving during the height of the pandemic.

The topic is personal to Arciaga, whose family left the Philippines after Marcos declared martial law. After serving in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War, he entered nursing, encouraged by his wife — who is also a nurse — thinking it would be temporary. Instead, the decision sparked a decades-long career.

Arciaga says it’s an honor to join the ranks of Filipino nurses who have come before him, and he is a member of the Philippine Nurses Association of America.

Arciaga was active in numerous local organizations, but he didn’t see anyone coordinating with national efforts.

“I want to live in a world, a society that respects civil liberties, that respects freedom,” Arciaga said. “I want a government that respects democracy and the rule of law, and I want my legacy to be that of someone who stood up.”

Joe Arciaga organized No King rallies in L.A.'s 
Historic Filipinotown.

He co-founded the Echo Park chapter of Indivisible, the national progressive organization, and the Filipino American Lakas Collective, a group organizing for civil liberties and democracy. And when Indivisible announced the No Kings rallies, he wanted to host one. But he had never put together a protest before.

So he called up Levid, who he met during the production of “Nurse Unseen,” remembering her experience as a union organizer. Levid shared resources she had made and trained volunteers on how to host a successful action. She helped organize the rally in June – and the following one in October, where she agreed to speak. She didn’t know how much larger the crowd would be the second time around.

Wearing all black in the blazing sun, Levid didn’t speak for long, but by the end of her speech the crowd was energized. “They have never and will never break the revolutionary spirit of women’s resistance,” Levid yelled before starting a chant.

“When women and children are under attack, what do we do?”

“Stand up, fight back!” the crowd cheered.

“When our community is under attack, what do we do?”

“Stand up, fight back!”

With two protests under his belt, Arciaga is gearing up for the third No Kings rally, planned for March 28. It will take place at Unidad Park again, where a diverse community will assemble beneath an enormous mural of Filipino freedom fighters.

The name of the mural is “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana.”

Its meaning: A glorious history, a golden legacy.

About the author: Jasmine Mithani is the technology reporter at The 19th. Her coverage revolves around themes of information access, privacy, and politics. Online experiences shape our offline world, so she often writes about extremism and intimate partner violence as well. Jasmine's reporting frequently centers LGBTQ+ perspectives and intersects with reproductive rights. She has a soft spot for stories about the South Asian diaspora and good books and tries to report on solutions, not just problems.