Did Sabrina Carpenter get the response she wanted from the cover of her latest album, Man’s Best Friend? It shows the singer on her knees beside a faceless man standing over her, wearing a suit, and clutching her hair.
“If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t do anything anticipating what the reaction will be,” Carpenter answered when asked this question by Interview magazine in a story published online Tuesday. “I only do things that speak to me, that feel right, and make sense when you hear the music. When I came up with the imaging for it, it was so clear to me what it meant. So the reaction is fascinating to me. You just watch it unravel and go, ‘Wow.'”
The cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album has been hotly debated.
The Lede Company
The controversial image dropped in June, ahead of the album’s August debut, and riled those who said it was degrading to women.
It attracted so much attention that Carpenter felt compelled to share an alternate cover posted June 25 that she made sure to say had been “approved by God.”
Sabrina Carpenter shared an alternative album cover for ‘Man’s Best Friend’.
Island Records
But, really, the 26-year-old said of the original, which survived, “is a metaphor, but I’m sure that other people are like, ‘Dang, she’s a sub?'”
Carpenter was asked if all the discussion made her cry or laugh.
“I guess a little bit of both,” she said. “My experience and point of view are going to be so different from how other people live their lives. Sometimes I read things and I’m like, ‘Wow, I don’t experience this that way, but if they do, then that’s real to them.” But what I’m going through in this record, which is loss and heartbreak and celebration and trying to navigate my life as a young woman—it’s not so much like I’m above it all, but I’m not beneath it, either.”
Man’s Best Friend is Carpenter’s seventh studio album, and her follow-up to Short n’ Sweet, which she released to much success in August 2024.
In June, the same month she dropped her album covers, she defended the sometimes controversial, racy choices she’s made in her career.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
“It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” Carpenter said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular.”
She noted that some of the people complaining were the same ones who enjoy her music.
“Clearly you love sex,” she said. “You’re obsessed with it.”