There’s an old wives’ tale known among crafty folks as the Sweater Curse: Knit your boyfriend a sweater, and you’ll soon be paid for your hours of hard work in the form of a breakup. My mind instantly referenced the Sweater Curse when, back in June 2024, Sabrina Carpenter cast her then-boyfriend Barry Keoghan in the music video for “Please Please Please,” soon-to-be her first #1 hit. “I know that you’re an actor, so act like a stand-up guy,” Carpenter pleads in the song, released just as Saltburn was making Keoghan a household name. Whether by curse or not, they were broken up by the end of the year.
A lot of us — “us” being, say, unmarried young women who date men — tend to scrub our Instagram pages clean post-breakup, embarrassed by the evidence of a relationship that didn’t work out. But Carpenter, who’s spent over half her life in at least a remote sliver of the public eye, doesn’t often seem too worried about painting herself in a potentially unflattering light. You would’ve thought Carpenter had been caught in a proper scandal based on the reactions to the artwork for her seventh studio album Man’s Best Friend, out today. In the filtered photo, Carpenter is fully clothed but kneeling on the floor, her hand grazing the leg of an anonymous suited man gripping a fistful of her hair. But Carpenter isn’t looking at the man. She’s breaking the fourth wall as she gazes straight into the camera, appearing not ashamed but relaxed and confident.
Many argued that the female submission implied with the Man’s Best Friend cover was an indicator of post-Roe regression; some argued that it was a giant leap for mainstream kink representation. If only the album was as interesting as the conversations it spawned.
Man’s Best Friend arrives just a year after Carpenter’s Grammy-winning breakthrough album Short N’ Sweet, an album that often finds her amid the ignorant bliss of developing a new crush, often wondering what it would be like to bang him. And like Short N’ Sweet, Man’s Best Friend is replete with innuendo and embellished with more explicit sexual references: “I promise none of this is a metaphor/ I just want you to come inside,” she winks over the heavy synths of album highlight “House Tour.” It’s not quite boundary-breaking, but Carpenter has always treated sex as an inherent fact of life: “The album is not for any pearl-clutchers,” she recently told CBS This Morning. “But I also think that even pearl-clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves.”
Man’s Best Friend doesn’t feel much like a new era for Carpenter — to borrow language from her mentor and tourmate — as it does a continuation of the ever-relatable miscellaneous moments on Short N’ Sweet when that crush’s sexy, flawless exterior begins to crack. Carpenter has said that the album is about embracing the “disappointment in relationships and all the different shapes it takes,” although most of what we know about her relationships has been observed via social media rather than the lyrical content of her music. But on this album, Carpenter does disclose one important contextual detail: She’s been dumped.
Man’s Best Friend explores romance from the tail end of a doomed relationship and takes us through Carpenter’s lightly-messy post-breakup grief. She declares her exasperated frustration (“I just hope you get agoraphobia someday/ And all your days are sunny from your windowpane”), distracts herself with new eye candy (“I did a double-take, triple take/ Take me to naked Twister back at your place”), and bemoans every pathetic gray area in-between (“He fell in love with self-restraint/ And now it’s getting out of hand!”). The only thing more mortifying than dating a so-called manchild, Carpenter suggests across Man’s Best Friend, is not having had the foresight to initiate the breakup first.
So from the moment the album kicks off with its self-explanatory lead single “Manchild,” Carpenter makes her thesis clear: It’s a tough time to be a single straight woman. On the subsequent “Tears,” a spiritual sequel of sorts to Short N’ Sweet’s “Slim Pickins,” she admits to getting horned up at the thought of a guy being responsible enough to… remember to text her back. Amy Allen and John Ryan’s glimmering disco instrumental is just barely enough to hold my interest through a song otherwise limited to shock value — those “tears,” she tells this unicorn of a man, are coming down her thighs.
Even with returning collaborator Jack Antonoff’s sparkling, texturally-dense signature scattered across Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter knew it’d be near-impossible to top Short N’ Sweet, regardless of how long it took her to even try. As she told Rolling Stone: “[Man’s Best Friend] wasn’t written from a place of ‘How do I one-up myself?’ or ‘How do I re-create something else?'” The low-stakes mentality is a luxury for an artist at her level — one that sometimes leads an artist down rewarding creative pathways but in this case has yielded a collection of songs that play like Short N’ Sweet bonus tracks.
Sonically, Man’s Best Friend abides by the same formula as its predecessor, nimbly weaving between elements of funk, country, and R&B. Highlights like “Manchild,” “Nobody’s Son,” and “House Tour” are bold and vivid in their production, but the sharpness there makes the record’s lesser moments all the more dull. Tracks like “Go Go Juice” — an elder Zoomer spin on outlaw country drinkin’ anthems — see her lean in harder towards her absurdist sense of humor, a trait that’s noticeably absent from sleepier tracks like “Sugar Talking” and “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night.”
Carpenter’s complaints across Man’s Best Friend are valid and universally felt — it’s tough dating men. It’s even tougher to want them. And for most women, it’s easier to mope and wag a fist at patriarchal structures than it is to meaningfully consider our roles within them. There are plenty of reasons to complain about men, and Man’s Best Friend does, at its high points, make airing out the dirty laundry fun. Elsewhere, the album is more bark than bite.
Man’s Best Friend is out now via Island.
