Everyone today is scrambling to say their piece about Sabrina Carpenter. After all, she’s one of the biggest stars in the world, a position that is bound to bring tireless discourse with it. While lots of ink has been spilled about Sabrina Carpenter’s playfully sexual persona, her work is deserving of its attention based on merit alone. Hit singles like “Nonsense,” “Taste” and “Please Please Please” are cleverly constructed, both musically and lyrically, and while her last album was by no means a masterpiece, it served as a blueprint for Carpenter’s artistic identity. It established Carpenter’s love of pristine production, cheeky and unconventional lyrics and above all, big choruses. If you share her love of these things, as I certainly do, it’s a pretty decent listen. Her new album “Man’s Best Friend,” however, is a startling regression that fails to live up to her enormous commercial success.
Right off the gate, the opening track and lead single “Manchild” rings alarm bells. It has the sonic conventions of her previous work, but it lacks the wit and originality of her best songs. There isn’t even an attempt at humor in the lyrics; instead, it sees her regurgitating cliches. This man is poorly dressed, lazy, and dumb? Who cares?! Where’s the woman who wrote “Ooh it feels so good I had to jump the octave?” Aside from that, the chorus is unimaginative and bland.
This, unfortunately, is a taste of what’s to come, as the album delivers mediocre track after mediocre track. The middle section of the album is particularly flabbergasting, and makes me wonder if she somehow needed extra filler material to pad out a tracklist that isn’t even 40 minutes long. “When Did You Get Hot?” is particularly bad. Her flat lyrical flow doesn’t sound any less stale over an honest attempt at an Alanis Morrisette pastiche, and top of that, lyrics like “you were an ugly kid/but you’re a sexy man” fail to evoke anything. The following track, “Go Go Juice,” is similarly frustrating, its barrage of unremarkable couplets culminating in a by-the-numbers sing along section that feels more like junior prom than it does a pain-stricken night at the bar. All I have to say about “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry” is that its title is the most clever thing about it.
There are two tracks I truly enjoy on this album. “Nobody’s Son” and “House Tour” both deliver anthemic choruses and fantastically composed instrumentals, showing that Carpenter is still capable of delivering a great tune (even if said tune contains lyrical bombs like “I promise none of this is a metaphor, I just want you to come inside”). Still, the album as a whole is solidly disappointing, a definitive case of the sophomore slump that feels like it was mostly created out of obligation. In a world where music is made for the algorithm rather than the fans, and where pop music is as bland and commercial as it always has been, Carpenter was a potential breath of fresh air. But “Man’s Best Friend” shows her riding her own coat tails, vaguely gesturing in the direction of her previous successes and pantomiming the same persona while not delivering much substance at all. I was never her biggest fan, but dear reader, you can count me among the men who have had their hearts broken by Sabrina Carpenter.
