What do you do after releasing one of 2024’s most popular pop albums, stealing the show at the Grammys and dominating the charts all summer with your hot new single, “Manchild?” If you’re pop star Sabrina Carpenter, you create an album funnier, wittier and more fearless than ever.
On Aug. 29, Carpenter released her new album titled “Man’s Best Friend,” following up on her hit album “Short n’ Sweet,” released about a year ago on August 23, 2024. “Short n’ Sweet” was a global sensation with 362,000 streams in the first week alone.
The album–”Man’s Best Friend”– follows her hot single, “Manchild,” which was released on June 5. “Manchild” hit No.1 on Billboard Hot 100, making it Carpenter’s first song to reach the No.1 spot. The song pokes fun at men, referring to them as “stupid” or “slow.” In the song, Carpenter sings “Won’t you let an innocent woman be,” expressing to her listeners just how fed up she is with certain men’s behaviors. The beat of most of the song is steady, keeping it pretty lowkey. However, there are moments of intense drumming when she sings lyrics like “half your brain just ain’t there.”
Following the success of the song, Carpenter also released a music video. The video takes place in the desert and starts out with Carpenter flinging herself out of a car, singing the first line in her song “oh boy.” She then hitchhikes to get picked up by another car right away. The scenes in this video display Carpenter becoming tired and fed up with one man, so she moves on to another. Her moods in each clip also switch from having fun, to getting annoyed, to full on screaming and kicking. Towards the end, each scene progressively gets more violent: she shoots at the men, blows them up and drives them off a cliff. We think this is an amazing ironic twist on the idea that Carpenter is “innocent.”
Carpenter says listening to the album in order is the best way to understand it. “The story kind of starts, you know, when you’re still in a relationship, and ends obviously when you’re kind of on the other end of it,” Carpenter said. She starts the album off with “Manchild” and ends it with a song titled “Goodbye.” “Goodbye” has an amusing tone, joking about break ups. The song starts out with a soft piano playing, making you think that it’s going to be a quieter song, until the drum beat picks up, turning it in another direction. Carpenter’s lyrics include statements like “Goodbye means that you’re losin’ me for life,” and “Well, just give it three weeks, buddy, gonna wake up from your coma, honey,” adding on to her usual sarcastic tone of the song. With the first song being about jumping from relationship to relationship all the way to being at a break up stage, you can understand what Carpenter means when she says that the track list follows a relationship.
Song number five, “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” exemplifies exactly what the title says. This song is definitely one of the quieter ones on the album, with Carpenter singing softer. The main instrument is an acoustic guitar, which definitely added on to that whole calmer vibe. Mainly, this song is about how the relationship is slowly falling apart, and how the couple is so used to breaking up and getting back together. We really liked the feeling this song brought, and how it contrasted the others so drastically.
Track number eight, “When Did You Get Hot?,” speaks on the physical transformation of a man in Carpenter’s life. With lyrics like “I think I would remember if you had that face,” shows her genuine surprise at the fact that change has occurred. This song plays with Carpenter’s higher vocals and riffs in both the verses and the chorus. The song ends with a slow waning outro, leaving room to imagine where the relationship is headed after her realization of the new appearance.
“House Tour” provides a funky techno beat, which is vastly different from some of the other tracks on the album. The song insinuates that Carpenter wants to give her date a house tour so the date can keep going in her house. She makes comments about how she is proud of the designing aspects of the house, referring to the multiple floors, couches and waxed floors. The lyrics are strung together in rhymes to create a flow-y rhythm throughout the song.
In all, this album is different in many ways in comparison to “Short and Sweet,” but still carries much of Carpenter’s signature style with witty lyrics and playful beats. With a full listen, Carpenter delivers a clear story of different interactions and experiences she has had with men in the past. We think this album was a great way to follow up her previous album and will be hard to top in the future.
