All posts tagged: sb19

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.

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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 …

SB 19 at Lollapalooza 2026

SB19 Proves the Tourism Ambassador Bet Paid Off with Lollapalooza Debut

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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 …