Two nights after they tied at the Star Awards, the 74th FAMAS Awards gave Maricel Soriano Best Actress and made Maris Racal the first recipient of its new Actress of Distinction award.
BINI and SB19 tied for the most wins at the 11th PPOP Music Awards with five each, while newer acts OONA., XONARA and 6ENSE picked up their first major trophies.
IV of Spades walked in with the most nominations of any act. The three biggest awards went to other people.
IV of Spades’ Andalucia already won Album of the Year at the Awit Awards on September 15. It’s nominated again at the October 6 Filipino Music Awards.
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 …
OPM icon Celeste Legaspi sparks online debate after praising SB19 while expressing reservations about BINI, leading Blooms to defend the nation’s girl group.
A festival slot, a TV debut, a Spotify feature, and a sold-out CD, all in one week. SB19 is building Japan deliberately, not just touring through it.
Days after SB19 took the Allianz Stage at Lollapalooza, the Philippine Senate has entered the story. Not with another performance. With paperwork. Senator Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV filed Senate Resolution No. 545 on July 31, one day after SB19 became the first Filipino act to perform at Lollapalooza. Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan followed with Senate Resolution No. 573 on August 4. Both measures put the group’s Chicago appearance into the machinery of the Philippine government, where a festival set becomes something considerably more official: a matter for the legislative record. SB19’s Lollapalooza performance was, first, a pop-culture event. It was a major American festival slot, a milestone for Filipino music, and another step in a global run that has increasingly made the group look less like a local success story and more like an export. Now it is also a Senate story. From Grant Park to the Senate Record Aquino’s resolution recognizes SB19’s Lollapalooza appearance as a significant milestone for Filipino artists and Original Pilipino Music on the global stage. Pangilinan’s resolution similarly describes …
Four days. That’s how long it took SB19 to go from pop group to instrument of Philippine tourism policy. On July 26, the Department of Tourism named the five-member act as the country’s newest tourism ambassadors. Four days later, on July 30, they walked onto the Allianz Stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and became the first homegrown Filipino act to ever play the festival. Two headlines, four days apart, and they’re not really two stories. They’re the same story, told first by the government and then by a hundred thousand people at Grant Park. The Set That Made It Real Whatever the DOT announcement meant on paper, Lollapalooza is the part that had to be earned in front of a crowd that had no obligation to care. SB19 — Pablo, Josh, Stell, Ken, and Justin — opened their hour-long set with “DAM,” moving straight into “GENTO,” the song that’s done more than any other to put P-pop on non-Filipino radars. They dropped a new single, “LAWLESS,” the same day, released as a standalone track rather …
