In June, Sabrina Carpenter announced her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend; its artwork depicts Carpenter on her hands and knees, an unseen man grasping a handful of her hair. It instantly caused an uproar online – most notably among Carpenter’s young fans, who weren’t on Tumblr in 2015, or weren’t aware of the way the Sun newspaper wrote about Madonna every day of the 1990s and 2000s, and therefore didn’t realise that discourse around whether pop stars should or shouldn’t be allowed to sexualise themselves is older than pop music itself, and almost always inane.
Anyone hitting play on Man’s Best Friend in search of another barrel-full of ragebait might be alarmed, not because it is particularly provocative, but because it is strangely old-fashioned. Carpenter is fond of blue turns of phrase (“Gave me his whole heart and I gave him head”), and the wordiness of her lyrics is indicative of someone who grew up in an era of constant stimulus. But Man’s Best Friend makes it clear that she regards pop music as a craft as much as it is an art.
Few A-list albums released in recent years are as tightly stitched and locked-in as this one; played almost entirely with live instruments and packed with so many hooks that it feels as if it might burst at the seams, it seems a true creative arrival for Carpenter. The most significant provocation here may be a newly minted star, beloved by gen Z, going against industry orthodoxy and packing an album with unusual instruments, including clavinet, sitar and agogo, and making distinct allusions to Abba and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.
To date, Carpenter has been known for hits such as Nonsense and Espresso, which largely succeeded off the back of solid hooks and whip-smart wordplay. Man’s Best Friend feels like a rejoinder to anyone who suggested Espresso was simplistic froth: these songs are disarmingly complex, almost weaselly in their ability to make intricate, unconventional structure sound effortless. Lead single Manchild is the kind of pop song that super-producer Max Martin might call “incorrect”: its second verse has a completely different melody than the first, which is different again from the bridge; the whole thing gallops along to a rumbling, country-fried groove and all the while Carpenter is rhyming things like “hard to get” and “incompetent” and trilling her way through the phrase “fuck my liiiiiiiife!”
Carpenter’s music has always been smarter than she gets credit for, but Manchild is astounding in its construction and stickiness. 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 is so busy; it really only 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 on Willpower, a lush Eurodisco song that pairs lyrics about sexual frustration and rejection with Boney M-esque schmaltz, and House Tour, which takes the quotidian brilliance of Diana Ross’s It’s My House to its natural extreme with the lyric “The couch is really comfy, comfy / Got some Chips Ahoy if you’re hungry?”
Although there are sonic allusions to Abba across 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 concern on this record is right there in the title – men treat the women they date like dogs – and she treats it with a lightheartedness that matches her tongue-in-cheek, Betty Boop-esque image. But these songs are expansive and durable in their execution: Antonoff drafted the members of his band Bleachers, in-demand session musicians in their own right, to play across these songs, and their presence elevates them greatly, turning stellar pop tracks into teeming productions you wish you could hear the individual stems of.
We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night, about the kind of generically rocky relationship that many of my friends seem to be in, is a small scale epic, cresting with a grand guitar solo and skyward-soaring strings. After producing such a sustained run of records with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey and many more, Antonoff seems to be persona non grata among pop fans right now who see him as overexposed and predictable, but Man’s Best Friend makes a strong case for his continued presence. He, Carpenter, Allen and Ryan work together like a finely tuned machine; Man’s Best Friend, to me, feels like a producer/artist pairing on par with his work with Del Rey on her instant-classic Norman Fucking Rockwell!. The tolerances between her writing and his production on this album are minuscule, and makes its predecessor, the solid Short’n’Sweet – which spent 49 weeks in the UK Top 10 and produced three No 1 singles – sound practically rudimentary in comparison.
The trade-off, when Carpenter is this much in the zone, is that everything about her music that rankles with people – the over-reliance on profane language, the overstuffing of songs with innuendo, the vaudevillian hamminess – is here in spades. That stuff could get tiresome across previous albums, but the difference on Man’s Best Friend is that everything else is so finely tuned, and so delightfully detailed, that it is easy to get over the occasionally lazy, internet-worn line (“I get wet at the thought of you / being a responsible guy”) or the fact that many of these songs cover noticeably similar ideas. Then again, there’s a Trojan horse quality to Man’s Best Friend: it’s so distinctly Carpenter that you might not even realise it’s one of the year’s singular, musically provocative pop records.