After years toiling in the post-Disney-star pop ecosystem, Sabrina Carpenter finally broke through last year with Short n’ Sweet, her sixth album, which rode to pop ubiquity (and strong Grammys recognition) off the back of “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” its three catchy, sharply written megahit singles. Since then, she’s staged a gigantic global arena tour and, somehow, found time to record a follow-up: Man’s Best Friend, which once again finds her working with Jack Antonoff, John Ryan, and the songwriter Amy Allen.
Like its predecessor, Man’s Best Friend positions Carpenter as a kind of TikTok-era Mae West: a sex symbol who’s in on the joke, and who can flick between sweet and savage in milliseconds. This time around, there’s a little more sadness and frustration in the mix—Short n’ Sweet might have made frequent reference to the irresistible nature of Carpenter, but this record pokes some holes in that self-confidence as she sings about men who are disinterested, rude, or just plain annoying. Here are five key takeaways.
Provocation with Purpose
Man’s Best Friend was already a media sensation before it even came out, thanks to its vaguely provocative cover—Carpenter, on all fours, with a man in a suit grabbing her hair—and its title, which some fans assumed was being presented literally and uncritically. In truth, the presentation of the album makes a lot of sense when you listen to it: Many of these songs, like “My Man on Willpower” and “We Almost Broke Up Again,” center on Carpenter’s inability to cut herself off from men who trifle with her emotions or make her feel undervalued. (On her being treated, in other words, like a dog.)
Euro Swag
One of the songs on Sabrina Carpenter’s pre-show playlist is ABBA’s “If It Wasn’t For The Nights,” an underrated and relatively obscure from 1979’s Voulez-Vous, written by Björn Ulvaeus about how his own sense of workaholism was the only thing getting him through his divorce from Agnetha Faltskog. Carpenter’s ABBA standom comes into full bloom on Man’s Best Friend, which draws distinct influence from the lush white European pop of the ’70s and ’80s. There are shades of “I’ve Been Waiting For You” on “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” while “Nobody’s Son” plays like a love letter to the Swedish pop industry, somehow nodding to “One of Us,” Ace of Base’s “The Sign” and Jens Lekman’s “The Opposite of Hallelujah” in equal measure.
Then there’s “Goodbye,” the album’s triumphantly acerbic closer, which channels “Voulez-Vous” and the hearty chug of “Take a Chance on Me.” If Carpenter wants to stay in this lane for a while, there’s still plenty of weird ABBA music from which to mine inspiration: personally, I’d love to hear her take on “Visitors”-esque paranoid coldwave.
