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.
