Sabrina Carpenter
Man’s Best Friend
ISLAND
Creepy, funny, and supposedly misogynistic album cover aside, pop’s other brassy showgirl is sticking to the success-filled formula of last summer’s Short n’ Sweet for 2025’s Man’s Best Friend: similar-sounding mood boards of non-regional country bangers and nondescript (but sassy, nonetheless) electronica featuring chipper, breathy vocals as the cherry atop a very creamy, nut-free, edgeless sundae. Only, you know, packaged with an image of its creator as an obediently heeling dog gracing its cover.
Sabrina Carpenter and her team of co-producers (Jack Antonoff in his assigned role as the diving rod of 21st century girl pop, US division) and co-songwriters (longtime collaborator Amy Allen, John Ryan) have plotted Man’s Best Friend to hit all of the grace notes from Short n’ Sweet in a timely fashion. The record starts with the C&W-tinged, bad-boy, diss-you/miss-you moment of “Manchild” before throwing in a silly, sexed-up middle section (the three-song mini-opera of “Never Getting Laid,” “When Did You Get Hot?,” and “Go Go Juice”), and ends the proceedings with the heartache for survival’s sake with the soliloquy of “Goodbye.”
The shift in Carpenter’s aesthetic on Man’s Best Friend—not seismic, but still noticeable—comes from her embrace of the risqué and ribald double (or triple) entendre. Even before 2024, Carpenter and co-writer Allen had become the funniest pairing of song-scribes since the heyday of Leiber & Stoller, knowing how to sculpt a catchy pop tune that encapsulates all the proper lyrical highs and lows. There’s little that’s hidden to the imagination of a track such as “Tears,” with its cry of “I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy / Treating me like you’re supposed to do / Tears run down my thighs.” Or “Sugar Talking,” and its implication of wasted words versus present and active duty: “Put your loving where your mouth is / Your paragraphs mean shit to me, and get your sorry ass to mine.”
From Carpenter’s skin-on-skin lyricism—be it metaphorical or bluntly commanded—to her every breathy bon mot, the contagion of Man’s Best Friend is as calculated as the Dow. Thankfully, Sabrina Carpenter makes for one bold mathematician.
