Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or so they say. In that case, Meghan Trainor’s Toy With Me is the biggest compliment anyone could ever pay Sabrina Carpenter. Between the sexy pastel babydoll aesthetic, glitzy production, cheeky hooks, (attempts at) winking innuendo, and even the stupid banged wig in every visualizer, there’s very little on the “All About That Bass” singer’s latest album that does not have the Short n’ Sweet star in its DNA. What doesn’t scream Sabrina, though, screams someone else: “Chef’s Kiss” echoes Taylor Swift’s “Karma”; “Rich Man” feels a little too close to aespa’s hit of the same name from last year. None of this compares to the closing track, “Shimmer,” which is so close to Tate McRae’s “Just Keep Watching” that a future lawsuit wouldn’t be surprising. The bridge is nearly identical to McRae’s chorus, down to lines like “Just do it like this, break your back”—shockingly similar to McCrae’s “Goes like this, start with the track / Eyes on me, archin’ my back.” You have to wonder what the hell Trainor’s team was thinking.
Everything else feels pulled from TikTok: Trainor, a 32-year-old with three kids, spends most of the album dropping slang like “delulu,” “main character,” “yapping,” “serve,” and even, bafflingly, “don’t be a beta.” I think she also tries to be hip with the youth on “Men’s Tears,” but she fails to realize that the “male tears” coffee cup meme became cringe about eight years ago. Toy With Me is a grab-bag of every 2026 pop culture reference imaginable, less an album than a bid for virality. That would explain why it’s sixteen songs long—twenty, if you include the “deluxe reissue” that dropped yesterday. It still feels like Meghan Trainor, albeit minimally: there are still some ‘50s-inspired doo-wop numbers, which have inexplicably always been her bag, and the final two tracks recall earlier hits like “No” and “Me Too.” But there’s little reason to listen to this album when others exist—including Trainor’s own Thank You. That’s the problem with this imitative approach: if I want to listen to Sabrina Carpenter, I’ll put on Man’s Best Friend, not Toy With Me. And not just because Carpenter did it first, but because she does it much better.
Carpenter’s music has a genuine fun and cheekiness that largely eludes Trainor’s, perhaps in part because Trainor is deathly focused on how much she has to prove, despite constantly assuring us otherwise. Toy With Me is anchored in latent, simmering hurt, not twinkly fun. But frustratingly, Trainor never fully commits to vulnerability, always couching it in some stupid girlbossism: “Cry Baby” begins with an honest accounting of self (“I feel hated, overwhelmed / Underrated, and all by myself”) before bursting into an annoying taunt of “I bet you’d be a crybaby / You’d by a crybaby if they talked all that shit ‘bout you.” Similarly, “Princess” asks us to make some commotion“for this dress / ‘Cause it hides that I’m broken.”
Trainor seems to think she’s hiding the hurt better than she is. When an artist spends a third of their album insisting, “No, but, like, I really don’t care, guys, I promise,” you start to wonder if maybe they do care a little; the lady doth protest too much, methinks. “Still Don’t Care” is arguably the worst offender, as would be expected from the title alone. But unlike the other half-dozen songs on Toy With Me that follow in its tradition, “Still Don’t Care” at least paws at vulnerability. Trainor sings about the hate she’s received (“Said I was way too thick, then I got way too thin,” referencing her weight loss after rising to fame with 2015’s “All About That Bass,” which was framed as a body-positivity anthem). Other songs like “Rich Man,” “Delulu,” “Chef’s Kiss,” and “Shimmer” are broader and dumber, full of hollow aphorisms that sound like bars penned for a Drag Race girl group challenge: “I’m so pretty and so paid,” “I love it when they hate me / No, they can’t escape me,” “I wanna make them mad / Let them get bitter,” and so on. (Hell, some of the lines don’t even make sense—“I wanna get them hot / Until they shiver” simply boggles the mind, considering you only shiver when cold.)
Then there are the innuendos. The insufferable “Pink Cadillac” rather quickly pivots from female independence to getting fucked by a man in the backseat with doo-wop backing and a lot of onomatopoeia (“I got my heels on the horn like beep, beep, beep / Like the birds and the bees say tweet, tweet, tweet”). “Ladylike” negs its subject by telling him to not to be a beta—a term used exclusively by hyperonline 14-year-old boys trapped in the manosphere—before Trainor veers into more nonsensical mouth sounds (“You me that / Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-barap”). “Toy With Me” turns Trainor into a literal fuckdoll: “Well, you’ve found your favorite doll / It’s time to turn me on and / Toy with me, baby.” Her denial of being a feminist in 2014 makes a lot of sense now (although, honestly, it’s tracked since tradwife anthem “Dear Future Husband”). She also says “giddyup” a lot in this song about being a doll, which is a weird mixing of metaphors, but I digress.
The only tracks that aren’t about being a) totally confident and not at all insecure or b) horny are “Get in Girl,” the very Sabrina Carpenter-coded “Potential” (it starts with “Boy, you’re so dumb, but / Man, you got plenty potential”), the bland ballad “Angels,” a worse version of the Victorious song “Take A Hint” in “Hush,” and “Little One,” a cornball tribute to Trainor’s kids. “Little One” is the only track on Toy With Me that stands out as unique, despite being unbearably cheesy. I suppose there is something to be said for the fact that it at least feels like a song Meghan Trainor wanted to make, rather than a lab-made ripoff of other popstars’ ideas in some last-chance bid for a hit.
But in Trainor’s defense: the woman can sing. She’s always been talented, which makes her mediocrity all the sadder. There are catchy moments in Toy With Me: “Shimmer” has been stuck in my head all day, and “Get In Girl” was tailor-made to be an earworm. It’s Trainor’s poppiest and boppiest album in a minute. Unfortunately, though, the best songs are good precisely because they sound like other artists. There’s the rub: even if Meghan Trainor can offer legitimate pipes and catchy hooks, there are a lot of other popstars who can offer legitimate pipes, catchy hooks, clever lyrics, an idiosyncratic style, a consistent brand, and a unique point-of-view. In an over-crowded, fast-paced pop industry, imitation isn’t going to cut it. The redundant bubblegum arrangements of Toy With Me never get past that. Even if Trainor does manage to score a viral fifteen-second TikTok sound—and that’s a pretty damn big if—it’s hard to imagine it’ll go any further than that: fifteen seconds of fame, not a moment longer. [Epic/Sony]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
