Sabrina Carpenter ‘Man’s Best Friend’ - A Playful Pop Provocation

Pop music has always thrived on dualities — desire and denial, vulnerability and bravado, sugar and sting — and on Man’s Best Friend, Sabrina Carpenter proves she can juggle them all, usually in the space of a single verse.

Opening with ‘Manchild’, a sly country-pop hybrid that pokes fun at arrested masculinity, the album wastes no time in skewering modern romance. From there, Carpenter stretches into full camp with ‘Tears’, a delirious disco fantasia whose outrageous lyricism feels pitched somewhere between Donna Summer and John Waters. Elsewhere, she slides into tenderness — ‘We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night’ and ‘Nobody’s Son’ mark moments of raw candour, proof that even Carpenter’s bite comes with bruises.

The middle act of the album flirts with reinvention: ‘When Did You Get Hot?’ channels jagged Alanis Morissette rhythms, while ‘Go Go Juice’ leans into rollicking country-pop, complete with lyrical Easter eggs destined to light up stan Twitter. And then there’s ‘House Tour’, Carpenter’s cheeky ode to seduction disguised as real estate appraisal — a track that encapsulates her unique ability to lace genuine craft with smirking irony.

Closing on the barbed kiss-off ‘Goodbye’, Carpenter signs off in multiple languages, but the message is universal: this is an artist unafraid to laugh, cry, and swear her way through the messiness of love.

Man’s Best Friend may not be an album for the pearl-clutchers, but it’s precisely this refusal to self-censor that makes Carpenter such a vital pop presence. Cheeky, cultured, and utterly commanding, she’s proved that in the theatre of modern pop, she can be both the jester and the queen.