Sabrina Carpenter’s new album is so sexy you’ll need a cold shower

3 months ago 23

Sabrina Carpenter, Man’s Best Friend

Can Sabrina Carpenter stay single forever, please? We all want her to be happy, sure, but her wisecracks — and she’s got zingers for days — are inspired by dalliances that go pear-shaped for some reason or another. Lasting love, I fear, may not inspire the same spice.

Back with a new album just one year after the similarly fanged Short n’Sweet took the world by storm, Carpenter admitted to Rolling Stone that she could have dined out on her breakthrough for “much, much longer”, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that she doesn’t care too much for rules.

Following the 2022 breakup album Emails I Can’t Send, Short n’Sweet skewered situationships with ribald lyrics that cemented Carpenter as one of pop’s sharpest, funniest songwriters. Carpenter leaned into this playful raunchiness on the album’s accompanying tour, rubbing conservative critics the wrong way while tapping into the quality that makes a true star: being wholly unapologetic about it.

It helped that the songs were spun-gold pop, irresistibly arranged and maximally polished. If you weren’t listening to the lyrics carefully, you’d never guess these breezy confections were spikier than a blowfish.

The suggestive cover art for Man’s Best Friend inspired tut-tutting over what some described as a step backwards for feminism. But make no mistake, on her third album with “complete creative control” since signing to Island Records in 2021, Carpenter knows exactly what she’s doing. Sex will always sell, and the tiny blonde bombshell is not short of material.

Sabrina Carpenter proves sex sells, but does the music match the spice?

Popular lyrics annotation website Genius might teach tweens more than they should know about Carpenter’s double entendres, but they’re probably too young for the real joke in Tears – that “a little communication” and being able to “assemble a chair from IKEA” is what really gets Carpenter going.

On Manchild, she’s rolling her eyes at immature men, but in the song’s bridge she winkingly hints at her own accountability a la Lie to Girls, a lyrical standout on Short n’ Sweet. “Oh, I like my boys playing hard to get/And I like my men all incompetent/And I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them,” she sings before affirming “Amen!” and then, brightly, “Hey, men!” , already eyeing off her next “useless” distraction.

Carpenter’s self-awareness is a huge part of her appeal. She’s not afraid to send a few barbs her own way, but never lingers too long on her mistakes, shrugging them off with a toss of her golden hair. Sometimes she’s got no time for Sugar Talking (“Yeah, your paragraphs mean shit to me/get your sorry ass to mine”); at other times she’s irritated to discover she’s no longer got the upper hand: “Can I return it, get back the version I like?/This one’s bullshit, baby” (My Man on Willpower).

Bar the fizzy House Tour, which channels the early ’90s sass of Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson, musically Man’s Best Friend is less immediate than Short n’Sweet, trading sugar rush synth-pop for something a little more mature. There’s a country twang to Manchild, My Man On Willpower and Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry, a pretty ballad that promises a new lover she’ll leave him “feeling like a shell of a man,” while When Did You Get Hot? is an Ariana Grande-esque slinky jam.

It almost makes you wonder if these songs were actually Short n’Sweet offcuts – still very serviceable, to be sure, but not quite as fun as the bops that made Carpenter go big time.