Once upon a time, primarily in the pre-raunch ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there was a genre of film popularly known as the sex comedy, in which adult relationships (and what we now might call situationships) were mined for faintly risque but reasonably sophisticated laughs and maybe even a slight bit of actual insight. It’s anyone’s guess whether Sabrina Carpenter has seen a lot of those movies in the course of absorbing all the old-school show biz that informs her public persona, but boy, does she know sex comedy. No other star of the screen or songland is nearly so dedicated to getting laughs out of the carnage in the battle of the sexes, as she does to an even further degree in her very winning new album, “Man’s Best Friend.”
And make no mistake, this is musical comedy, through and through. Across 12 songs, there’s nary a verse or chorus in which Carpenter’s tongue isn’t in her cheek, even as the songs get at stuff anyone who’s been part of the dating world may find slightly painful in the abstract. They all play like excerpts from a sly stage musical that she and her three writing collaborators — Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen and John Ryan — really ought to get around to writing, someday, in their vast spare time. For now, they’ve got an album that is almost guaranteed to leave a constant smirk on your face, if the vagaries of young heartbreak and lust are something that resonates with you at all. Or wait, is that an actual expression of glee? Because in its best moments the music itself has the power to produce that, too. There are different levels of pleasure to be found in an album that asks the musical question: What if ABBA had a sense of humor?
As fair warning, what Carpenter told “CBS Mornings” can be reiterated here: There will be pearl-clutching. (And if you’ve spent enough time with this album’s double entendres, your mind may immediately go to wondering whether clutched pearls is a euphemism for something.) Unlike the somewhat more genteel movie sex comedies referenced earlier, “Man’s Best Friend” would have earned an R rating by about the third or fourth song, albeit not so much for explicitness — though there are some single, double and triple entendres — as for the casual use of the F-word in a non-sexual context. This is just to say: We’re not trying to promise Noel Coward-level wit here. But you don’t have to be part of her target demo to appreciate how difficult the task was that Carpenter and her three (and only three!) co-writers have pulled off, in sustaining a pretty consistent level of bemusement across 38 short ‘n’ sweet minutes… amid a lot of expertly crafted key changes and melodic lifts that act as a hell of a set of insurance policies in case the laughter doesn’t land.
The album starts off with “Manchild,” the three-month-old lead-off single that almost everryone will have heard enough times by now to skip over. It’s good, and certainly acts as an effective overture for the why-are-you-so-lame theme of a bunch of the songs that follow… but most of the songs that follow are actually considerably better. Into that category we can place the second track in the running order and just-released second single, “Tears,” which on the one hand is one of this album’s dirtier numbers and on the other hand really aims to extol the sexiness of Ikea assembly and voluntary dish-washing. Carpenter is having fun with an immediate bit of misdirection: “I get wet at the thought of you…,” she sings to start off with, and your heart may fall for just a half-second: Oh, it’s going to be that kind of an album. And then, without missing a beat (well, OK, missing just one beat), she concludes the thought: “…being a responsible guy.” Now, Carpenter did not invent the comedic idea that women get horny from men being thoughtful and productive, but she might’ve kinda perfected it here.
And the year’s most memorable line, for better or worse, or better and worse — the grateful end result of all this model male behavior being that “tears drip down my thighs”? There is a groan going through America upon the first listen to that one… but again, is it a groan of cringe, or of pleasure? Either way, wonders are worked in how Jack Ryan and Carpenter, this track’s co-producers, have a promising piano intro bleed into the best full-on, four-on-the-floor disco revival we’ve had in a few seasons. I don’t know how the dance clubs of America are going to program this in the coming months without just making their customers double over, but the beat will find a way — it always does.
The third track, “My Man on Willpower,” is when things start getting more interesting. It’s almost the opposite of “Tears”: Now, her man is self-actualizing and doing all the right things, and she hates it, because he’s lost his libido in finding himself. “My man’s in touch with his emotions / My man won’t touch me with a twenty-foot pole,” she laments. “My slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least / What in the fucked-up romantic dark comedy is this nightmare?” This is the first appearance of a trope that recurs at several points throughout the album: Sabrina Carpenter is undersexed.
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Playing the part of the romantically and sexually thwarted underdog in a failing relationship — as she also does in “Nobody’s Son” and “Never Getting Laid” — is a kind of smart self-deprecation that lets Carpenter be as much of an Everygirl as she is a glammed-up dream girl. If a pop goddess who pours on the red lipstick and shows twice as much leg as any 5-foot woman could possibly have still can’t keep her man turned on, how much better should her less glam audience feel if it’s happened to them? It’s an interesting contrast that Carpenter plays just right when she’s singing her tragically amusing tales of woe — a sad sack in a babydoll dress. Not that she’s playing any of this as someone who’s likely to be lonely for long; her bafflement over guys’ behavior is ours, too.
As bold as she can be in painting herself as a loser in love, she’s also wise enough not to milk that through an entire album, and balances the admittedly delightful downers with a few numbers that have her very much large and in charge. Besides “Tears,” there is one other unabashedly sexy song on the album — “House Tour,” which appears to be the singer inviting someone inside her home at the end of a date, until you quickly realize that the home is, uh, her. (Mothers, hide your daughters’ ears, then clutch the pearls, as any flight attendant would surely advise.) “Go-Go Juice,” which advises alcohol use and a night on the town as a cure for being dumped, could be straight out of the Kesha school of philosophy. “Sugar Talking” might be the closest thing to seriously intentioned maturity here: In this one, she advises a guy who is content to spend more time texting than visiting that “your paragraphs mean shit to me / Get your sorry ass to mine.” Crudely spoken, but advocating for in-person interaction is the beginning of 21st century wisdom.
The oddest song, perhaps, is “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry” — one of those titles that already seemed amusing just on the track list, and lives up to its potential. Carpenter really does not spend a lot of time trying to sound like Taylor Swift, which is a pretty tough trap to avoid in 2025, even if Swift isn’t your tourmate and pal and even if you didn’t hire on her primary producer. But in this number, Carpenter manages to momentarily seem Swift-ian in two different, contrasting ways. The reflective music bed sounds a little like something out of the earnest “Folklore” or “Evermore” albums, yet the lyrics are pure “Blank Space,” in the proud and not-entirely-serious threat to just go into a relationship and do some serious damage. It’s an odd juxtaposition of music and lyric, but Carpenter does succeed in sounding like a menace for a minute.
Hard as it is to believe at this late date, not everyone gets yet that Carpenter is up to something a lot more wily and smart than just being a sex goddess. It would be difficult to miss that she is a comedienne at heart if you saw her madcap Christmas special a couple years back, or if you’ve seen her on awards shows pulling weird stunts like a note-for-note remake of an old Goldie Hawn routine. But the passing outrage over the album cover for the standard edition of “Man’s Best friend” speaks to the fact that not everybody gets here, or cares to. It’s clearly a kind of satire — she may or may not wanna be your dog in a relationship — not a serious endorsement of S&M, or worse. Just as clearly, it was meant to button-push a little, so maybe we can’t blame the part of the world that was properly provoked for taking the imagey at surface value. But this was not Madonna doing a “Sex” book; this was Carpenter being , sa clever goofball, spoofing her own submissive tendencies.
Chasing after wit can be a challenge even for someone with a more selective audience, let alone at the level of superstardom Carpenter has recently achieved. Who else is doing that? Taylor, maybe, for a song here or there, but her persona is essentially a serious one; ditto for Chappell Roan, whose sense of mirth is strong but maybe not her overriding thing. Carpenter is carving out a channel for herself that allows her to indulge in a kind of musical blitheness common to the legit stage but not something we find so much in pop.
Which begs a question: How will she be treated by the Grammys? There’s an old maxim — a true maxim — that Oscar voters don’t have the slightest idea what to do with comedy, even at an elevated level like “Barbie.” The Recording Academy may or may not be bound by such blinders, but if she does get in the race, it’ll make for an interesting contrast — a brazen woman whose persona is about standing up to male hypocrisy battling it out with some of the male hypersincerity of the past year. Whatever you think of these respective works, could any record be any more of an anti-“Ordinary” than the raucous one Carpenter just put out ?
Anyway, there should be an award for pulling off what Carpenter and her cohorts pull off in a song like the half-romantic “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”: sounding a lot like vintage ELO, with its swirling violins and Mellotrons… even if the comparison forces you to imagine how Jeff Lynne would sound drolly singing lines like “We had our sex, and then we made amends.” Maybe he would sound great doing that, but how charming it is to have Carpenter offering a fresh, feminist and frolicsome coopting of some of the classic sounds we associate with pure pleasure, like ELO and ABBA, now with additional real-life relationship tensions and titters. She can joke about the ups and downs of being “man’s best friend,” but right now she’s sure one of pop’s.
From Variety US