All posts tagged: OPM

IV of Spades wins Song of the Year for "Aura" at the 39th Awit Awards

39th Awit Awards 2026: IV of Spades Takes Album and Song of the Year. SB19 Led the Nominations and Still Came Up Short.

The 39th Awit Awards handed out its three biggest trophies tonight, and the act with the most nominations in the building didn’t win a single one of them. SB19 led the ceremony — organized annually by the Philippine Association of the Record Industry (PARI) — with 12 nods across grand, performance, and technical categories. By the end of the night at SM Mall of Asia Arena, Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year had all gone somewhere else. The Comeback Wins the Marquee IV of Spades took Album of the Year for Andalucia and Song of the Year for “Aura” — the same single that marked the rock band’s return after nearly five years on hiatus, released as a surprise drop in mid-2025 alongside the comeback of lead vocalist Blaster Salonga. Winning the two biggest creative-output awards in the same year the band came back from a multi-year gap isn’t a small distinction; it’s PARI’s industry peers reading Andalucia less as a solid follow-up and more as a genuine …

Promotional banner for Nicole Asensio's September 19 performance, Songwriter, at 78 Salcedo in Makati.

Nicole Asensio Finally Lets You Hear the Songs She Never Finished

Nicole Asensio has spent two decades being introduced by other people’s expectations. She fronted the all-girl rock band General Luna before launching a solo career and releasing her debut album, Schizoprano, in 2015. Since then, the Filipino singer-songwriter has built a career across genres that rarely share a bill — Rock, Jazz, Classical, Soul, Blues — earning a reputation as a multi-awarded performer and recording artist over two decades and 16 countries. On September 19, she’s setting all of that aside for one night. Songwriter, a special performance at 78 Salcedo in Makati’s Salcedo Village, strips the sets and the stagecraft down to something closer to the source: 20 songs, drawn from hundreds Asensio has written over the years, performed the way they first existed — as pen, paper, and not much else. Two Sets, Two Versions of the Same Songwriter The evening splits into two halves. The first, “Pen to Performance,” takes ten songs Asensio has released over the past decade and reworks them into a stripped-down, more intimate form than the recorded versions …