The Singles Jukebox

14 years after “Grenade,” Bruno finally found someone who would do the same…

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[5.70]

Kayla Beardslee: Hey, when is that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars collab being released?
[5]

Ian Mathers: Mars and Gaga are both skilled at their craft in a way that often seems like a throwback to an earlier era of the art/industry, taking the biggest swings possible in terms of seeking mass appeal without feeling like they’re compromising or calculated, talented mimics and style chameleons when they want to be. Working together on a big, heartfelt, suitable-for-all-occasions ballad actually feels perfect along those lines. The result is the kind of sturdily good (or “good,” depending on your sensibilities) song that, if it catches you at the right moment in your life, might make you bust out crying.
[7]

Joshua Lu: This collaboration would’ve been unthinkable in 2010; now that their careers have somehow converged, the outcome feels weirdly predictable. The emotional heft, vocal runs, and vague nostalgia are there, even if all it does is fill that “Perfect Duet”-sized hole in pop radio. “Die With a Smile” can’t help but feel underwhelming in the context of their career trajectories — the kind of corny balladry that Bruno’s outgrown and that Gaga mostly uses just to recapture the general public — but it’s impossible to wholly reject when it’s this nicely crafted.
[6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Most Obamacore song of 2024, hands down. “Die with a Smile” is this very specific meld of the era when you couldn’t go to the supermarket without hearing a Bruno Mars ballad and when Gaga was doing a country pivot (although this is far blander than anything on Joanne). It’s been a while since I’ve heard such blatant Grammy bait.
[3]

Jackie Powell: Entertainment Weekly‘s Joey Nolfi wrote that “Die with a Smile” is a song that recalls “the emotional bravado” of “Shallow,” the Grammy- and Oscar-winning smash from Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born. He’s correct. “Die With a Smile” thrives upon accented and intentional dynamics while making vague and simple lyrics mean more than it they do on the page. That’s also what made “Shallow” so convincing. The difference on “Die With A Smile” is that Bruno Mars is more Lady Gaga’s equal than Bradley Cooper ever was. Mars has more to sing on a song that has Gaga’s name billed first, but both artists shine without the other having to sacrifice. Gaga’s part, which begins at around a minute and a half until the song’s end, transforms this from a Silk Sonic B-side into something that’s much more memorable, emotionally resonant and cinematic. It’s a song that makes me wish I had someone to sing it to. 
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Katherine St. Asaph: So old-fashioned that YouTube’s preroll ad recommended me Botox, and so definitively a Bruno Mars song that I’m genuinely unsure why the credits are in the order they’re in. It works, albeit in an unexciting way, because Bruno and Gaga have practiced melodrama for years — see “I’d take a bullet straight to my brain” and “not even the Gods above can separate the two of us,” respectively — and have also practiced singing pretty then belting big.
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Jeffrey Brister: When it comes to Bruno Mars, I want immaculately executed genre pastiche, something that sounds like the past but keeps a thrilling modern affect. Gaga, for all of her artsy subversion and slight avant-garde leanings, has just as much of a traditionalist impulse, if not stronger; under the right circumstances, the results can be explosive. That alchemy is present here: two artists synced up and bringing out the best in each other’s performances. There is absolutely nothing new here, but it’s polished and perfectly executed. I’m a mark for that sort of thing.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s not right to say Bruno Mars is so adept with pastiche that he transcends it; pastiche is his artform, his milieu, the genre that this genre artist seeks to perfect. “Die With a Smile” has two ideas: the first being the familiar terrain of the Bruno Mars ballad, and the second being “What if a Bruno Mars ballad was Jeff Buckley?” Even a few years after the 1994 release of Grace, pop music seemed like it only had room in its past for an artist like Buckley: a soulful and beautiful singer-songwriter who leaned toward rock-god charisma rather than folkish introspection. Mars has Buckley’s swooning fragility as well as his stormy squalls of guitar, but for all that Buckley represented the last of something, he never sounded like he was going over someone else’s territory. That fundamentally does not work for Mars’s attempt to recreate the sound; navigating someone else’s territory is Mars’s entire point. If “Die With a Smile” has a third idea, it’s the addition of Lady Gaga, who is herself no stranger to pastiche (see the Madonna-isms of “Born This Way,” the heartland rock of “You and I,” or the way she slipped effortlessly into the Hollywood prestige turn that was “Shallow”). Here, she delivers only competence, as if she’d been asked to sing backup on a new recording of “When I Was Your Man” and found out at the last moment that the assignment had changed.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Once you get past the surprise of “Die With a Smile” being a Jeff Buckley impression, it’s remarkably insubstantial. “If the world was ending I’d wanna be next to you” sounds clunky and hyper-literal next to, say, “I’d catch a grenade for you”. At least the harmonies are nice.
[4]

Iain Mew: Bruno Mars’s progression makes it a fruitful idea to go back and invert “Grenade” from a distance. Back then, he took the prospect of death as an opportunity to bitterly prove his unmatched love. Now he meets no less than the end of the world with smooth certainty that it’s a chance for mutual togetherness. Lady Gaga’s way with projecting intensity and sincerity in the most extreme contexts makes her the perfect foil, and for two lines after she comes in, it’s transcendent. Then Mars comes back in, and not only is there not enough space for Gaga to shine, there’s barely any space at all. Maybe the old anxiety hadn’t gone away completely after all.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Bruno Mars hasn’t sounded this convincing a love man in years, if ever. Too convincing: Gaga is a backup singer on her own single. Mars sure would fuck himself if he could.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Someone pointed out recently how absurd it is that Lady Gaga’s Twitter bio is literally advertising for the HBO Chromatica Ball special, Haus Labs cosmetics, Joker: Folie à Deux, and now “Die with a Smile.” That sums up my feelings toward this entry into the Gaga canon: random and indicating a certain directionlessness—or perhaps overdirection?—in her career. She sounds great, and the bridge is perfect TikTok fodder, but she and Bruno Mars sound like they have as much sexual chemistry as brother and sister. 
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TA Inskeep: Mars and Gaga sound nice enough together, but there’s no frisson, no spark; they’re just two famous singers, singing a duet for you to stream and buy. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: To the song’s great benefit, the annihilatory proposition is underblown. Instead, its precise lilt is folded and finessed throughout, heading hither and thither without over-accelerating or escalating. It’s a fine balance between ostentation and undulation. There’s minimal vocal chemistry, but the blend is happening elsewhere.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I was with family over the weekend, and my brother asked “who is this??” like it was two stunning new artists on their debut single. Upon learning it was Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, his excitement dissipated. Only Andrew Watt could make two of pop’s best vocalists sound anonymous (don’t get me started on that weightless drum sound he’s inexplicably made his signature). I can’t tell where Gaga ends and Bruno begins, which is a horrible mental image.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: The drums treat every other measure like it’s a climax because the entire song, or more precisely its billing, is one undifferentiated climax. Which means no build-up, no peaks or valleys, no memorable grooves or meaningful sense of release. It’s just those two names together on a lighted marquee, a chart-watcher fanfic straight out of 2012, What Could Be measuring short against What Must Be, which in this case is the greatest common denominator of softer-than-talcum piano balladry. At least “Grenade” had cartoon bloodletting on its side, and “Shallow” had the benefit of context. “Die with a Smile” reaches for that old doomsday rhetoric out of sheer reflex, even when the prophesized end is painted in washed-out watercolors, like a dream whose outlines dissipate five seconds after waking. Andrew Watt’s approach to retromania is less playful than the Smeezingtons’ was, but also strangely less reverent, since if you truly revere the music of the past then you don’t try to half-seriously Mandela effect yourself into its hit parade.
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Nortey Dowuona: Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga getting to coast by cornering the market on having both vocal talent and a modicum of charisma — you know, the old-fashioned model — would be frustrating, but at least Watt’s patient hand is keeping this over there next to the white Broadway crowd. Anything but more Bruno funk.
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Mark Sinker: Obviously I want to claim I’m only onboard with Bruno as a project at last thanks to Gaga’s in-video cigarette — casually centred, disgustingly compelling — but I have to admit it’s something entirely more wholesome: the actual topic, the actual melody, the actual delivery! He got me in the end! (Also, I like thinking of him as a little monster. He is a little monster….) 
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Would be a [6] with flipped Mars-Gaga ratio, but even then this would not quite get to the force of melodrama that would allow it to reach exit velocity and escape the great and depressing middle ground of tasteful 20th-century pop pastiche. These two have taken enough stabs at staid, boring pop songs for all occasions that they have become the legacy acts they once aspired toward and collaborated with. Good for them; bad for us.
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Kristen S. Hé: As much as I wish this Venn diagram had produced something more adventurous, it’s arguably harder to write a song like this — one that’ll probably be on radio rotation for decades, and that I’ll never object to hearing in any context. I’ve often found Bruno’s schtick cloying and insincere, but here, I’d believe it even without Gaga’s added star power. Bruno, please stay in this lane forever. (Gaga, please don’t!)
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