Sabrina Carpenter has spent the summer of 2025 wrapped up in both controversy and conversation. The pop star, who has been dominating the charts with smash hits like “Espresso,” “Please Please Please,” and “Taste,” announced her newest album, Man’s Best Friend, on June 11. Her cheeky humor and male-centered narratives have been a topic of discussion for a long time. Now that the album has officially dropped, the songs and lyrics have provided an insight into Carpenter’s unique creative vision. The conventional choices in regards to tone and topic choice, while clarifying her self awareness about her toxic and difficult relationships with men and the love she experiences, have also proved to be the Achilles’ heel of this project.
The album opens with “Manchild,” the lead single for this project and her first-ever debut single to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song details her experiences with immature men, and it provides a fun twist on Carpenter’s usual sound with a slight country feel. This song is both a scathing critique of the men who mistreat her and an in-depth look at her predicament of always going back to the men who hurt her. Many have found the song to be an absolute earworm and an excellent way to start the album, myself included. The bridge is one of my favorites of any song in her discography, and it set a very high and hopeful expectation for the rest of the album.
On “Tears,” Carpenter humorously declares how she would give her all to a man who simply does the bare minimum: “A little initiative can go a very long, long way,” “Baby, just do the dishes, I’ll give you what you, what you, what you want,” and “A little respect for women can get you very, very far.” These are hilarious and fascinating insights into the state of Carpenter’s relationships and psyche. Being happy with getting the bare minimum from a relationship is a compelling storyline that many can relate to, and Carpenter delivers it in her signature funny style. The various ways that Carpenter must bring herself down in order to preserve her relationships in these first two songs pulled me in and set what I had assumed was a precedent for the tone of the rest of the album.
Despite this, the storyline shifts around the ten minute mark of the album. The man that Carpenter is begging to behave on past songs like “Please Please Please” has suddenly become the one who has worked on themselves in the relationship. The song “My Man On Willpower” is such a fascinating concept because we haven’t seen Carpenter on the other side of the table in recent memory. Before this point, she has written about the awful things men have done to her, but we’ve never witnessed her as the toxic and insecure one in the romance. This unique viewpoint instantly made this song stand out on the album.
However, this introspective spin on her narrative doesn’t last for very long. As we start getting into the middle of this album, the upbeat nature and bubbly, humorous pop Carpenter is most known for goes way down, instead replaced by slow, yearning ballads about the singer’s relationships. The stretch of songs from “Sugar Talking” to “Never Getting Laid” didn’t do it for me as much as the beginning of this album did. Something I’ve noticed is that I tend to prefer Carpenter’s funny and upbeat songs more than her more lyrically focused tunes. Looking into this further, this isn’t a problem of her lyricism, but the narrative she writes of her muse. Carpenter’s most recent two albums, Short and Sweet and Man’s Best Friend, have contained songs all about her experiences with men. The inspiration she gets from them has created some of the catchiest pop songs in recent years, but it also has, in my opinion, become tired. Many of her songs tell the same story about how she is either irrepressibly in love with a man or how these men have ruined her life. After a while, this story arc becomes repetitive, leading to her songs sounding slightly indistinguishable from one another.
Something that would also really help with the original feel of these songs would be expanding the stories she tells. When she writes about the same types of experiences with men, her songs begin to feel repetitive and indistinguishable. She doesn’t have to change the slow nature of the songs at all—in fact, this style suits her voice a lot. Instead, she would benefit from expanding her creative vision more by spicing up her sound and widening the range of topics she writes about. One of the best examples of this is her hit from her 2022 album, Emails I Can’t Send: “Because I Liked A Boy”. On this song, her outstanding vocals really shine through, and she provides such fascinating and immersive commentary on how the internet loves to paint villains in stories they don’t know much about. This song would be considered a slower song, but it is one of my favorites in her discography for those reasons.
This hypothesis was confirmed as I kept listening to the record. Songs like “When Did You Get Hot?,” “Go Go Go Juice,” “House Tour,” and “Goodbye,” put a new spin on her sound while still feeling classically Sabrina. While they still paint the same narrative she usually sticks to, they also contribute a freshness, whether that be a new type of sound, like on “When Did You Get Hot?,” or contain memorable humor, like on “Goodbye.” The main difference between these songs and the slower ballads that I didn’t prefer earlier in the album is that this cluster of songs adds something new to every tune, while the ballads tend to all blur together by the end. Carpenter fails to introduce novelty to spice up the slower songs, but on these songs, she adds humor, a different style of pop that she’s never done before, or even little snippets of lyrics in other languages.
However, this stretch of catchy and fun songs was interrupted by another slower tune: “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night.” While this song has some really beautiful harmonies and vocals, I found the momentum of the album slowing down once again. The storyline of being in an unsteady relationship is not foreign in Carpenter’s discography, and I again found myself wishing that we could go back to the songs that added something new and exciting to her sound. I again found myself missing those lyrics in foreign languages and snippets of her dialogue in a drunken daze. If Carpenter applied that concept of switching things up more often, she could really take her music to the next level.
Overall, this album had some really new and exciting moments. I loved all the fun pop hits sprinkled throughout and how she didn’t let her signature humor and suggestiveness go with this new era. However, the one critique that I would have for her would be to find something new to make the slower songs hit just as hard as the upbeat ones. The ballads don’t have the advantage of including Carpenter’s notable jokes or puns – I wished that she try to add something new to these types of songs to make them just as special.
Considering all of this, I rate this album an 8/10. Her vocals and humor really shine on this project, as did her hit-making ability, and consistently implementing new concepts into her music would propel her even further in the music industry.
