September 2025 - Music

Sabrina Carpenter made Man’s Best Friend primarily with Jack Antonoff, who brought his Bleachers bandmates into the studio. (If only the name Sabrina Carpenter & Her Boyfriends weren’t already taken.) Aside from “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry,” which slips into the messy midtempo of his recent work with Taylor Swift, Antonoff’s earnestness becomes the foil to Carpenter’s snark. On “Sugar Talking,” he stitches three-chord country to a Babyface-style slow jam and, somehow, none of the seams show. “My Man on Willpower,” one of the album’s glitter-dusted ABBA homages, gives Carpenter a taste of her own medicine. “He used to be literally obsessed with me/I’m suddenly the least sought-after girl in the land,” she sings over an ascending progression that doubles as a tranquilizer for critical impulses. When “Goodbye” breaks out the saxophone, honky-tonk piano, and literal bells and whistles, you get the sense Carpenter and Antonoff are just showing off.

Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime. Count up the tricks she and Antonoff pull in “Go Go Juice”: “10 a.m. o’clock on a Tuesday,” the drunken singalong breakdown, the sideswipes at her famous exes. Their love of artifice is how you end up with the lyric “abstinence is just a state of mind,” delivered like Glinda floating away in a Technicolor pink bubble.

No matter how much controversy her pup-play album cover riles up, Carpenter is a pop star in the traditional mold—a showgirl, if you will. The “dress like a princess, curse like a sailor” gambit has nearly run its course, but what a coup in our vulgarly puritanical cultural moment. I picture a room of label execs clapping each other on the back while Carpenter turns toward the camera and winks.