Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Man’s Best Friend’ review: pop’s bawdy troubadour hits the melodic G-spot
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On her seventh studio album, pop’s pithiest lyricist hones the fun and flirty persona that’s made her a superstar
Though Sabrina Carpenter loves a double entendre, she understands that a single one can be just as effective. When she sings “I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy” on glistening disco swirler ‘Tears’, the second single from ‘Man’s Best Friend’, it’s every bit as on-brand as when she furnishes future-smash ‘House Tour’ with a risqué pay-off: “I just want you to come inside / But never enter through the back door.”
- Record label: Island Records
- Release date: August 29, 2025
Across ‘Man’s Best Friend’, Carpenter’s seventh studio album, the 26-year-old continues to hone the fun and flirty persona that makes her such a breath of fresh air. More than any other contemporary pop star, Carpenter seems like she’d be a blast to spend an afternoon shit-talking over shots with. At times, she’s so gleefully horny that she comes off like a Gen Z version of Blanche from The Golden Girls. “Hey, wait, can you lift my car with your hand?” she sings on ‘When Did You Get So Hot?’ “You were an ugly kid, but you’re a sexy man.”
‘Man’s Best Friend’ arrives barely a year after 2024’s ‘Short n’ Sweet’, the album that finally elevated Carpenter to pop’s A-list after a steady climb that began a decade earlier. Her earlier LPs contained bops aplenty, but last year’s hat-trick of globe-conquering bangers (‘Espresso’, ‘Please Please Please’ and ‘Taste’) finally made her a superstar.
Musically, this album isn’t markedly different from its predecessor, though it has a few more country-leaning cuts sprinkled among the daytime disco and featherlight funk. It also sticks to Carpenter’s winning formula of pairing sticky melodies with pithy lyrics about the flaws and allure of inadequate males. If there were a Bechdel Test for pop albums, ‘Man’s Best Friend’ wouldn’t be in danger of passing it.
Thanks to Carpenter’s playful self-awareness and growing musical confidence, it manages not to feel like too much, too soon. There’s no doubt she’s more in control of her sound than ever before. Carpenter has co-written extensively since her second album, 2016’s ‘Evolution’, but here she produces for the first time, too. And in tandem with her two co-producers – Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff and One Direction hit-maker John Ryan – she’s made an album that sounds consistently inviting and sometimes exciting.
In truth, ‘Man’s Best Friend’ would benefit from a couple more copper-bottomed bops like the slinky, Prince-influenced ‘House Tour’ and ‘When Did You Get So Hot?’, which sounds like a sleeper hit from a ’90s rom-com. But everything here is effortlessly hooky and cleverly constructed. ‘Go Go Juice’, a country shuffle about boozey rebound sex, gets suitably rowdier as it progresses. Even a slightly sluggish cut like ‘Don’t Worry, I’ll Make You Worry’, which sounds a bit like Lana Del Rey in Nashville, is melodically exquisite.
Given Carpenter’s fondness for even a dodgy double entendre, it feels fitting to end on one. With ‘Man’s Best Friend’, she’s done more than enough to keep herself on top.
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