Sabrina Carpeneter album ‘not for pearl clutchers’

Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, dropped on Friday to much excitement among fans online, but it came with a warning from the US pop star herself.

“The album is not for any pearl clutchers,” she told CBS News, with reference to prim, prudish or easily offended people.

“This is just fun – and that’s all it has to be,” she added of her often risqué live performances.

In June, the singer revealed alternative album artwork “approved by God” after the original cover – which showed her on her hands and knees in a black minidress with a suited man grabbing her hair – sparked controversy. Some argued it pandered to the male gaze and promoted misogynistic stereotypes.

CBS News’s Gayle King, interviewing Carpenter, praised her “sexual, powerful, vulnerable” and “unapologetic” new music, which includes recent chart-topper Manchild and new single Tears.

But, she offered: “I think there are some people that would listen to the music and they’d be clutching their pearls.”

“Correct,” Carpenter replied. “The album is not for any pearl clutchers. But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves.”

She added: “Sometimes people hear the lyrics that are really bold and they go, ‘I don’t want to sing this in front of other people’. It’s almost… TMI.

“But I think about being at a concert, with however many young women I see in the front row that are screaming at the top of their lungs with their best friends and you can go like, we can all sigh of relief.

“This is just fun – and that’s all it has to be.”

Of the 12 tracks on her new album, 10 of them are labelled as explicit.

Carpenter co-produced it with Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff, along with John Ryan, who also worked on her previous album, last year’s Short n’ Sweet, which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a three-star review, The Times’s Victoria Segal said that musically Man’s Best Friend was “negligee-thin, surprisingly vanilla”.

She added that after the initial cover artwork controversy, it “would have been amazing” if the album “was in fact so subversive that it crushed the male gaze for ever, somehow positioning Carpenter as an avenging angel, a cute pocket-sized gorgon turning men to stone.

“Unfortunately, nothing here justifies that cover image.”

The Independent also went for three stars, saying while “there are some sensational songs… too much of the rest struggles for lift-off”.

“With Carpenter circling many of the same themes in her lyrics, the hit rate on Man’s Best Friend is largely dependent on its song-by-song production,” wrote reviewer Adam White.

“House Tour is sensational, a chugging slice of 80s power-pop so instantly catchy that you’re able to forgive it holding some of the album’s biggest lyrical clunkers,” citing some of her more suggestive lyrics.

He added: “Carpenter is above all a brilliant aesthete, her videos and album artwork uniformly inspired.”

Meanwhile The Independent’s Emily Bootle called the album “TikTok slop”, adding: “She knows sex sells. That doesn’t make her a feminist – or make her music any more interesting.”

The New Statesman’s George Monaghan added: “Her new studio album, Man’s Best Friend, may be muted. But she remains the only popstar with comic talent.”

The singer-songwriter celebrated the album’s release with a Spotify-hosted fan event at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

She told Rolling Stone magazine the record “wasn’t written from a place of ‘how do I one-up myself?’ or ‘how do I re-­create something else?'”

She said: “Short n’ Sweet was this magical gift; it fed me, and it fed a lot of other people in the world. It felt true to me, and it felt authentic to a lot of other people. It’s rare that those line up ever, let alone more than once.

“It unlocked my brain to know myself more and more.”

The former Disney star, 26, has built her brand around fun and risqué pop music, and her sexual lyrics and provocative performances regularly cause a stir.

At the Brit Awards in March, media watchdog Ofcom received 825 complaints, with the majority involving her pre-watershed opening performance where she wore a red sparkly military-style mini-dress, with matching stockings and suspenders.

She was also seen having a close encounter with a dancer dressed as a soldier wearing a bearskin hat during the show, which was broadcast live on ITV.

Last month however, BBC News culture reporter Annabel Rackham noted how her performance at London’s Hyde Park had been “noticeably toned down as the US singer embraced a more family-friendly show”.

In her gig review, she wrote: “At one point a graphic flashed up on screen advising ‘parental discretion’ as Carpenter launched into album track Bed Chem. She ditched her usual sexually suggestive performance on song Juno and instead used a cannon to fire T-shirts into the crowd.

“Despite these changes she was still at her best, storming through a 17-song tracklist that comprised her biggest hits, charming the crowd with her Hollywood smile and incredibly bouncy hair.”