Why Bruno Mars, at 40, is still atop Billboard’s Hot 100.

Say this for the millennial generation of pop stars: They do longevity better. Maybe even better than the baby boomers, certainly better than Generation X. (It’s too soon to make predictions about Gen Z.)

For all the hype about the endurance of boomer bands like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd, who toured arenas and stadiums for years and years, their actual hitmaking periods were considerably shorter—maybe a dozen years each when they could reliably get new songs on the radio and the charts. The Eagles generated virtually all of their hits from 1972 to 1980. Fleetwood Mac scored their core set of Buckingham-Nicks–era pop hits from 1976 through 1988. Floyd’s essential hits came from 1973 to 1987. These boomer bands then toured those same songs for decades, plural.

Whereas … the millennial megastars? On the radio and on the current pop charts, they won’t go away. The marquee names born in the 1980s who broke through in the 2000s are each pushing a decade and a half to two decades of hitmaking apiece, with no signs of slowing down. Beyoncé, born in 1981, is now more than 20 years into a solo career studded with Hot 100 No. 1s, from “Crazy in Love” to “Texas Hold ’Em” (and that doesn’t include her Destiny’s Child years). Lady Gaga, born in 1986, and now 17 years removed from “Just Dance” and “Poker Face,” is still packing arenas with new hits like “Die With a Smile” and “Abracadabra.” Drake, also born in ’86, definitely hit a speed bump after his feud with Kendrick Lamar—but 16 years after “Best I Ever Had,” he returned to the winners’ circle just last year with “Nokia.” And by the way, Kendrick, born in ’87, broke through 14 years ago and just had his most successful chart year in 2025. And do I even need to mention the recording-and-touring colossus who named an album

 after her birth year, 1989? Taylor Swift’s longest-lasting No. 1 hit, “The Fate of Ophelia,” just vacated the Hot 100’s top spot last week, an amazing 20 years into her recording career. I could go on, expanding the list to another tier of millennial-slash-Z cuspers well past a decade of hitmaking and still scoring giant hits: Justin Bieber. Miley Cyrus. Ariana Grande.

To this list of millennial overachievers, let’s add one Peter Gene Hernandez, born in 1985, better known by his stage name: Bruno Mars. His hitmaking career is now well past the decade-and-a-half mark, dating back to his vocal on the 2010 B.o.B. chart-topper “Nothin’ on You” and his solo-career kickoff later that year, “Just the Way You Are.” What sets Mars apart from his peers is his productivity, or the lack thereof: He seems determined to generate as little new music as possible and still remain a megastar. In fact, I daresay Taylor and Drake, the two most prolific (to a fault) millennial megastars, should be taking notes. Hey, guys? Look at low long Bruno disappears between hits! He lets us miss him! And then he comes back on top like not a day has passed. Arguably, this week Bruno came back bigger than ever.

That’s because “I Just Might,” Mars’ long-awaited return to solo recording, doesn’t just hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, becoming his 10th career chart-topper. It debuts in the top slot, his first single ever to pull that off. Talk about presold: This amiable, fairly generic disco ditty packages everything the public has come to know and love about Bruno Mars over the past 16 years—and does little to reinvent the Bruno brand of cheeky, throwback pop-and-B. “I Just Might” could have appeared on any of Mars’ prior albums, or been a hit in any of his previous eras. Which … um, does Bruno Mars have eras? I’m not sure that Taylor-codified term, now commonplace among our 2020s pop deities, applies to Mars. He’s kind of a paradox, his decade and a half as a hegemonic pop force both admirably varied and yet—as a body of work—unfailingly consistent.

“I Just Might”—I have to keep typing the song’s title or I’ll forget it, like Harry Styles’s “As It Was”—is the leadoff single to The Romantic, Mars’ forthcoming fourth solo album, dropping in February. You read that right—fourth album! Dude has been recording and scoring hits since Barack Obama’s first term, and he’s only released three prior long-players. It’s been nearly a decade since the last one, the Grammy-winning 24K Magic, which came out in the fall of 2016, when Obama was still in the White House. In the intervening years, Mars has teamed with rapper-singer Anderson .Paak for their one-off 2021 album as Silk Sonic, which generated smashes like the No. 1 “Leave the Door Open,” and he’s put out a handful of collaborative singles, including 2018’s “Wake Up in the Sky,” with Gucci Mane and Kodak Black, a No. 11 hit; the aforementioned 2024 Lady Gaga duet “Die With a Smile,” a No. 1 smash and, per Billboard, 2025’s top single; and the 2024 breakthrough for K-pop singer Rosé, “Apt.”, a U.S. No. 3 hit and global No. 1 smash. The duets with Gaga and Rosé rode the charts simultaneously, but otherwise, Mars has gone years between hits. To paraphrase what Orson Welles said of Paul Masson wines, Mars will sell no tune before its time.

I guess he finally decided his latest glass was ready. Less than one week into 2026, Mars made it official with a four-word X tweet: “My album is done.” If the leadoff single is any indication, The Romantic will find Mars jumping onto the retro-disco bandwagon that’s been profitable this decade for the likes of Dua Lipa and Beyoncé. Critics have compared “I Just Might” to such dancefloor jams as Leo Sayer’s 1977 chart-topper “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” crossed with Junior Senior’s 2003 party classic “Move Your Feet.” I sorta hear all that, but to my ears Mars is still partially in his Silk Sonic bag, filtering his disco through some easy-swinging mid-’70s soul—think Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” or the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat.” In any case, Mars’ version of that sound is polished and glossy, with self-referential lyrics about the dancefloor itself and maybe even the song you’re already listening to: “Hey, Mr. DJ/ Play a song for this pretty little lady/ ’Cause if she dance as good as she look right now/ I just might, I just might make her my baby.” The bop sells itself, because it’s about bopping.

Lyrically, all of Mars’ hits have been about very little—love songs (“Just the Way You Are,” “Treasure”), heartbreak songs (“Grenade,” “When I Was Your Man”), lust songs (“Locked Out of Heaven,” “Versace on the Floor”), boastful struts (the Mark Ronson–credited, Bruno-fronted blockbuster “Uptown Funk!”). Lyrics are not where Mars focuses his energy. His talent is in what I call musical reupholstery: reviving old pop styles and making them sound fresh and current.

In an episode of my podcast Hit Parade a couple of years ago, I likened Mars’ shtick to that of Lenny Kravitz, a friend of Bruno’s and a fellow retro-fetishist from an earlier generation. Kravitz and Mars are style chameleons—in Mars’ case, some would say a cultural appropriator—who emulate their elder heroes so lovingly, you are meant to notice their borrowings. Kravitz wants you to catch that “Stand by My Woman” has wobbly John Lennon–circa–Plastic Ono Band piano on it (and a title echoing an actual Lennon hit). Mars wants you to clock that, on “Locked Out of Heaven,” he’s doing the Police better than Sting himself. In all cases, the trick is making these pastiches original enough not to be plagiarism and refreshed enough to be plausibly contemporary, so they don’t sound incongruous on Top 40 radio. This is harder than it looks. On the charts, Kravitz succeeded only intermittently, scoring five Top 40 pop hits in his entire ’90s–’00s career, only two of them Top 10s (“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over,” “Again”); as a guitar-forward artist, Kravitz did somewhat better on Billboard’s rock charts, but not exceptionally.

This makes Bruno Mars’ hit ratio that much more extraordinary—anytime he descends from his pop-factory Mt. Olympus with a new album, he tops the Hot 100. Literally all of his studio albums have generated at least one pop No. 1—he scored two each from 2010’s Doo-Wops & Hooligans and 2013’s Unorthodox Jukebox, one from 24K Magic, and even one from 2021’s collaborative .Paak LP An Evening With Silk Sonic. Now, in 2026, his new album hasn’t even come out yet, and it’s already preloaded with a chart-topper on it, too.

That new chart-topper broke faster than any of Mars’ prior smashes, in all of the Hot 100 components. Billboard reports that “I Just Might” opens at the top of both the streaming chart, with nearly 24 million first-week streams, and the digital sales chart, with 13,000 downloads purchased. (That sales number is tiny compared to the download numbers Bruno was putting up in the early-’10s, when the iTunes store was king, but it’s a strong number for 2026, and Mars has never opened atop the Digital Song Sales chart before.) The most remarkable chart stat is on the radio side: “I Just Might” opens at No. 12 on the airplay chart, which might not sound impressive but is startlingly fast for a new radio hit, the fastest start any Mars song has ever had on the airwaves, indicating near-universal acceptance out of the box.

How is 40-year-old Bruno Mars pulling off numbers like these so deep into his career? Again, we could ask the same question about the latest hits by 36-year-old Taylor Swift or 39-year-old Lady Gaga, and if that hotly rumored Act III album from 44-year-old Beyoncé’s trilogy of genre exercises materializes this year as expected, it’ll probably open massive, too. What has set this millennial generation of hitmakers apart is the zealous protection of their public brands, which supersede any stylistic or genre shifts they might attempt. Swift may shuffle from indie-folk to electro to maximalist pop from album to album, but her core brand as your try-hard best friend binds all the hits together. Gaga tries country-rock, standards, and Eurodance, but she is always Mother Monster, your beloved Vegas freak. And Beyoncé is literally sampling genres in her album trilogy—house music, country music, maybe rock next?—but her image as Queen Bey, chief executive of musical Black excellence, overarches all of the material.

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And Bruno Mars? He once titled an album Unorthodox Jukebox, and that’s also his brand—the showman (remember, he began his career as a child Elvis impersonator) who will try anything for a hit, execute it proficiently, and show you his work. That said, Mars is less like the aforementioned ladies insofar as his brand is more consistent from album to album. He may lean in one direction on an LP—the 24K Magic album was mining a ’90s New Jack Swing vibe, the Silk Sonic project aiming squarely for ’70s Philly soul—but these feel less like Taylor’s eras and more like flavors for Bruno. The Romantic might be all disco, but I doubt it. It’ll probably be a grab bag, and I guarantee it’ll all be catchy.

Earlier this week, I caught a video on Instagram of comedian Michelle Wolf commenting on the current celebrity scandal involving Beckham family—Victoria a.k.a. the former Posh Spice, her footballer husband David, and their estranged son Brooklyn. Wolf tried to explain why this deeply frilly tabloid gossip has taken off: “It’s so refreshing to have some drama that has literally zero effect on our lives … a respite from tariffs and Greenland and an impending world war.” Wolf’s observation put me in mind of Bruno Mars, and why “I Just Might” exploded on impact in January 2026. Mars has been providing weightless bops for nearly two decades, but unlike his previous chart-toppers, which had to climb their way to No. 1, “Might” opened on top, because right now we need something that lightweight. The mint-green suits he wears in the video might as well be flame retardant for our house on fire. Imagine that: Bruno Mars, reporting for duty. Thanks, jukebox.

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