In June, Sabrina Carpenter announced her seventh album, “Man’s Best Friend,” featuring artwork depicting a carpenter on her hands and knees, an unseen man clutching a handful of her hair. It immediately sparked outrage online — especially among Carpenter’s young fans who didn’t have Tumblr in 2015, or who weren’t aware of how The Sun newspaper wrote about Madonna every day in the 1990s and 2000s, and who therefore don’t realize that the discourse around whether or not pop stars should allow themselves to be sexualized is older than pop music, and almost always has been.
Anyone who hits the game for Man’s Best Friend in search of another barrel full of Ragebait might be upset, not because it’s particularly provocative, but because it’s oddly old-fashioned. Carpenter loves bluesy turns of phrase (“gave me all your heart and I gave him my head”), and the verbosity of her lyrics suggests someone who grew up in an age of constant stimulation. But Man’s Best Friend makes it clear that she considers pop music a craft as much as it is an art.
Few A-list albums released in recent years are as tightly stitched and locked together as this one; played almost entirely with live instruments and packed with so many hooks that it feels like it might burst at the seams, it feels like a true creative arrival for a carpenter. The most significant provocation here may be the newly minted star, beloved by Gen Z, who defies industry orthodoxy and packs the album with unusual instrumentation, including Clavinet, Sitar and Agogo, as well as a strong reference to ABBA and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.
Up until now, Carpenter has been known for hits like Foolishness and Espresso, which have largely found success on the back of solid hooks and whip-smart wordplay. Man’s Best Friend feels like a liability to anyone who suggested Espresso was a simplistic bird: these songs are disarmingly complex, almost weaselly in their ability to make a complex, unconventional structure seem effortless. Lead single Manchild is the kind of pop song that superproducer Max Martin might call “misguided”: its second verse has a completely different melody than the first, again different from the bridge; the whole thing gallops along, laced with country-fried grooves and all the while Carpenter, rhyming things like “hard to get” and “incompetent” and slogging his way through the phrase “fuck my liiiiiiiife!”
Carpenter’s music has always been smarter than she gets credit for, but Manchild is amazing in its construction and catchiness. It’s also a song that requires active listening. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was a dog’s breakfast, simply because it’s so busy; it only really clicked for me after a few listens, when I had enough time to process all the seemingly counterintuitive moving parts. The same goes for My Man After Willpower, a lush Eurodisco song that combines lyrics about sexual frustration and rejection with Boney M-esque schmaltz, and House Tour, which takes Diana Ross’s quotidian brilliance to my house to its natural extreme with the lyric “The couch is really comfy, comfy/got chips if you’re argumentative?”
Although there are sonic references to ABBA over Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter and her collaborators—Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, and John Ryan—seem to have taken a kind of metaphysical lesson from the Swedes: even bubbly, daytime radio-friendly songs deserve to be treated with care and attention to detail. Carpenter’s main lyrical problem on this record is right there in the title—men treat the women they date like dogs, and she handles it with a lightness that befits her tongue-in-cheek, Betty Boop-esque persona. But these songs are expansive and resilient in execution: Antonoff drafted her band’s bleachers, session musicians in their own right, to play over these songs, and their presence elevates them considerably, turning the stellar pop tracks into a production you’ll want to hear individual stems from.
Last night we almost broke up again, on the generally rocky relationship that many of my friends seem to have, small-scale epics that sizzle with grand guitar solos and sky-scaling strings. After such a long career recording with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana del Rey and many others, Antonoff seems to be Persona Non Grata among pop fans these days, who find him overexposed and predictable, but the man’s best friend is adamant about his continued presence. He, Carpenter, Allen and Ryan work together like a finely tuned machine; My Best Friend, I think, feels like the producer/artist who connects with her work with Del Rey on her instant classic Norman Fuckwell Rockwell!. The tolerances between her writing and his production on this album are minuscule and make its predecessor, the solid Short Short Short, which spent 49 weeks in the UK top ten and produced three No. 1 singles – sound compared to practically rudimentary.
The trade-off when Carpenter is in the zone so much is that everything about her music that ranks with people—the overreliance on profane language, the over-influence of songs with innuendo, the vaudevillian haminess—is here in spades. These little things could become tiresome on any previous album, but the difference with Man’s Best Friend is that everything else is so finely tuned and so delightfully detailed that it’s easy to get past the occasionally sloppy, Internet-worn line (“I’ve got a wet thought about you/Be a responsible guy”) or the fact that so many of these songs have noticeably similar ideas. Then again, there’s the Trojan Horse quality to Man’s Best Friend: It’s so distinctly Carpenter that you might not even realize it’s one of the year’s singular, musically provocative pop records.
