Historians will say it was “Espresso” that did it, but Sabrina Carpenter’s ascent to pop’s A-list truly began with “Nonsense.” At each stop on her tour behind 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, Carpenter performed the song with a bespoke bonus verse incorporating a local shoutout and a sexual innuendo. “Water ain’t the only thing I swallow,” she sang to a Chicago crowd that October. By January, “Nonsense” graduated from also-ran to the album’s only charting single, and Sabrina Carpenter as we now know her had arrived: witty, itty-bitty, a little smutty, dolled up like a powder-blue Peggy Lee. Now Carpenter is beloved by the classic pop constituencies (teen girls and gay men), while classic rock’s powers that be hold her in an esteem second only to Olivia Rodrigo. After nearly a decade in the para-Disney machinery, she’s understandably eager to keep a good thing going.
BRAT may have dominated the conversation in 2024, but it was Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet that truly achieved ubiquity: At one point, its singles “Taste,” “Please Please Please,” and “Espresso” occupied Nos. 2, 3, and 4 on the Hot 100. Man’s Best Friend arrives a year later, almost to the day, with comparatively little pomp. Its only single, “Manchild,” is sneakily endearing, like an explicit needlepoint you’ve passed in the hallway a few dozen times before bothering to stop and read. “Fuck my life,” Carpenter coos oh-so-sweetly, “Won’t you let an innocent woman be?” On Short n’ Sweet, she raided the costume closet—a Riviera disco diva’s sunnies, a sheer Y2K minidress, a dubiously authentic Pennsylvania twang—to find the one that best suited her. Delivering formally classic, facepalm-clever pop songs on a timetable unseen since Rihanna’s heyday, Man’s Best Friend takes the Sabrina persona to its apex, and maybe as far as it can go.
When Carpenter sings about sex with men, misandry begets horniness, which begets misandry. “Stranger danger” refers to when he’s not that into you anymore; fantasies of pregnancy remain blissfully immaterial. As she goes slackjawed over a man’s basic competence—“Assemble a chair from IKEA, I’m like, ‘Uhhh’”—“Tears” boogies to a fidgety strain of nu-disco pulled from the two-year window between Diana Ross’ Diana and Evelyn “Champagne” King’s Get Loose. Late-album highlight “House Tour” namedrops Chips Ahoy! in the midst of Carpenter’s lavishly long-winded and none-too-subtle metaphor: “Yeah, I spent a little fortune on the waxed floors/We can be a little reckless ’cause it’s insured.” It’s Madonna drag reverse-engineered through Madonna’s imitators—the exact sort of kitsch, reference-to-a-reference move that ought to signal just how serious Carpenter isn’t.
She made Man’s Best Friend primarily with Jack Antonoff, who brought his Bleachers bandmates into the studio. (If only the name Sabrina Carpenter & Her Boyfriends weren’t already taken.) Aside from “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry,” which slips into the messy midtempo of his recent work with Taylor Swift, Antonoff’s earnestness becomes the foil to Carpenter’s snark. On “Sugar Talking,” he stitches three-chord country to a Babyface-style slow jam and, somehow, none of the seams show. “My Man on Willpower,” one of the album’s glitter-dusted ABBA homages, gives Carpenter a taste of her own medicine. “He used to be literally obsessed with me/I’m suddenly the least sought-after girl in the land,” she sings over an ascending progression that doubles as a tranquilizer for critical impulses. When “Goodbye” breaks out the saxophone, honky-tonk piano, and literal bells and whistles, you get the sense Carpenter and Antonoff are just showing off.
Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime. Count up the tricks she and Antonoff pull in “Go Go Juice”: “10 a.m. o’clock on a Tuesday,” the drunken singalong breakdown, the sideswipes at her famous exes. Their love of artifice is how you end up with the lyric “abstinence is just a state of mind,” delivered like Glinda floating away in a Technicolor pink bubble.
No matter how much controversy her pup-play album cover riles up, Carpenter is a pop star in the traditional mold—a showgirl, if you will. The “dress like a princess, curse like a sailor” gambit has nearly run its course, but what a coup in our vulgarly puritanical cultural moment. I picture a room of label execs clapping each other on the back while Carpenter turns toward the camera and winks. They let her sing the word “fuck” 10 times.
