{"id":105593,"date":"2025-08-29T14:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T14:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105593\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T14:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T14:44:09","slug":"sabrina-carpenter-mans-best-friend-review-smut-and-stunning-craft-from-pops-best-in-show-sabrina-carpenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105593\/","title":{"rendered":"Sabrina Carpenter: Man\u2019s Best Friend review \u2013 smut and stunning craft from pop\u2019s best in show | Sabrina Carpenter"},"content":{"rendered":"

In June, Sabrina Carpenter announced her seventh album, Man\u2019s Best Friend; its artwork depicts Carpenter on her hands and knees, an unseen man grasping a handful of her hair. It instantly caused an uproar online<\/a> \u2013 most notably among Carpenter\u2019s young fans, who weren\u2019t on Tumblr in 2015, or weren\u2019t aware of the way the Sun newspaper wrote about Madonna every day of the 1990s and 2000s, and therefore didn\u2019t realise that discourse around whether pop stars should or shouldn\u2019t be allowed to sexualise themselves is older than pop music itself, and almost always inane.<\/p>\n

Anyone hitting play on Man\u2019s Best Friend in search of another barrel-full of ragebait might be alarmed, not because it is particularly provocative, but because it is strangely old-fashioned. Carpenter is fond of blue turns of phrase (\u201cGave me his whole heart and I gave him head\u201d), and the wordiness of her lyrics is indicative of someone who grew up in an era of constant stimulus. But Man\u2019s Best Friend makes it clear that she regards pop music as a craft as much as it is an art.<\/p>\n

Dogged by uproar\u2026 the cover art for Man\u2019s Best Friend.<\/p>\n

Few A-list albums released in recent years are as tightly stitched and locked-in as this one; played almost entirely with live instruments and packed with so many hooks that it feels as if it might burst at the seams, it seems a true creative arrival for Carpenter. The most significant provocation here may be a newly minted star, beloved by gen Z, going against industry orthodoxy and packing an album with unusual instruments, including clavinet, sitar and agogo, and making distinct allusions to Abba and Fleetwood Mac\u2019s Tusk.<\/p>\n

To date, Carpenter has been known for hits such as Nonsense and Espresso, which largely succeeded off the back of solid hooks and whip-smart wordplay. Man\u2019s Best Friend feels like a rejoinder to anyone who suggested Espresso was simplistic froth: these songs are disarmingly complex, almost weaselly in their ability to make intricate, unconventional structure sound effortless. Lead single Manchild is the kind of pop song that super-producer Max Martin might call \u201cincorrect\u201d: its second verse has a completely different melody than the first, which is different again from the bridge; the whole thing gallops along to a rumbling, country-fried groove and all the while Carpenter is rhyming things like \u201chard to get\u201d and \u201cincompetent\u201d and trilling her way through the phrase \u201cfuck my liiiiiiiife!\u201d<\/p>\n

Carpenter\u2019s music has always been smarter than she gets credit for, but Manchild is astounding in its construction and stickiness. It\u2019s also a song that requires active listening. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was a dog\u2019s breakfast, simply because it is so busy; it really only clicked for me after a few listens, when I had enough time to process all the seemingly counterintuitive moving parts. The same goes for My Man on Willpower, a lush Eurodisco song that pairs lyrics about sexual frustration and rejection with Boney M-esque schmaltz, and House Tour, which takes the quotidian brilliance of Diana Ross\u2019s It\u2019s My House to its natural extreme with the lyric \u201cThe couch is really comfy, comfy \/ Got some Chips Ahoy if you\u2019re hungry?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Although there are sonic allusions to Abba across Man\u2019s Best Friend, Carpenter and her collaborators \u2013 Jack Antonoff<\/a>, Amy Allen and John Ryan \u2013 seem to have taken a kind of metaphysical lesson from the Swedes: even bubbly, daytime radio-friendly songs deserve to be treated with care and attention to detail. Carpenter\u2019s main lyrical concern on this record is right there in the title \u2013 men treat the women they date like dogs \u2013 and she treats it with a lightheartedness that matches her tongue-in-cheek, Betty Boop-esque image. But these songs are expansive and durable in their execution: Antonoff drafted the members of his band Bleachers, in-demand session musicians in their own right, to play across these songs, and their presence elevates them greatly, turning stellar pop tracks into teeming productions you wish you could hear the individual stems of.<\/p>\n

We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night, about the kind of generically rocky relationship that many of my friends seem to be in, is a small scale epic, cresting with a grand guitar solo and skyward-soaring strings. After producing such a sustained run of records with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey and many more, Antonoff seems to be persona non grata among pop fans right now who see him as overexposed and predictable, but Man\u2019s Best Friend makes a strong case for his continued presence. He, Carpenter, Allen and Ryan work together like a finely tuned machine; Man\u2019s Best Friend, to me, feels like a producer\/artist pairing on par with his work with Del Rey on her instant-classic Norman Fucking Rockwell!. The tolerances between her writing and his production on this album are minuscule, and makes its predecessor, the solid Short\u2019n\u2019Sweet \u2013 which spent 49 weeks in the UK Top 10 and produced three No 1 singles \u2013 sound practically rudimentary in comparison.<\/p>\n

The trade-off, when Carpenter is this much in the zone, is that everything about her music that rankles with people \u2013 the over-reliance on profane language, the overstuffing of songs with innuendo, the vaudevillian hamminess \u2013 is here in spades. That stuff could get tiresome across previous albums, but the difference on Man\u2019s Best Friend is that everything else is so finely tuned, and so delightfully detailed, that it is easy to get over the occasionally lazy, internet-worn line (\u201cI get wet at the thought of you \/ being a responsible guy\u201d) or the fact that many of these songs cover noticeably similar ideas. Then again, there\u2019s a Trojan horse quality to Man\u2019s Best Friend: it\u2019s so distinctly Carpenter that you might not even realise it\u2019s one of the year\u2019s singular, musically provocative pop records.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In June, Sabrina Carpenter announced her seventh album, Man\u2019s Best Friend; its artwork depicts Carpenter on her hands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-105593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}