One of the cheekier songs on Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, “Man’s Best Friend,” is “Go Go Juice,” a country-microwaved self-deprecation about finding succor at the bottom of a bottle, and maybe with a boy she’d just as soon forget.
“Love when happy hour comes at 10 a.m. o’clock on a Tuesday,” Carpenter sings at the top.
Catch that? The redundancy in the lyric is funny or sloppy — maybe both.
That kind of whimsy was there, too, on Carpenter’s breakout hit, “Espresso” — “That’s that me, espresso,” she cooed, grammar be damned. These tiny flourishes made her last album, the breakout “Short n’ Sweet,” with witty hits like “Taste” and “Please Please Please,” feel like a suite of off-kilter intimacies. It earned her six Grammy nominations, and alongside Chappell Roan, Carpenter became one of pop’s new queens of quirk, making theatrically comic gestures feel human-scaled.
On this slight and frail but occasionally amusing new album, though, her character is still in development — what felt like hard-earned idiosyncrasy on her last album feels calculatedly careless here. Arriving one year and six days after its predecessor, “Man’s Best Friend” has all the hallmarks of a rush job: lyrical conceits that aren’t fully fleshed out, vocals that get crammed into prefab melodies, a repetition of themes that suggests a single idea viewed from multiple angles.
There are a tight dozen tracks here, nearly 39 minutes in all, and the sound is luxuriant early ’80s pop with varying amounts of sleaze. But time and again, Carpenter’s songs appear as if built from the concept down — convincing from a distance, brittle within.
Carpenter’s preferred weapon is blunt-force drama in the bed, at her best hilariously relating madcap adventures of sex and not-quite-romance. Sometimes, she’s the victim, sometimes she’s the villain, and she attacks both roles with equal gusto. On the album’s primary cover, she is on her knees, a man grabbing a thatch of her hair. Depending on your degree of cynicism, she looks ravenous, or dazed or something far more worrying. (Predictably, and intentionally, it stirred an online outcry.)
Beyond that, however, there’s an unsteadiness to Carpenter’s project. “Man’s Best Friend” is her seventh studio album, but the third of her grown-up pop star arc. (The prior ones are Disney era; she starred on “Girl Meets World.”) On those three, Carpenter has been three different kinds of performers: a confessionalist on “Emails I Can’t Send” from 2022, and on “Short n’ Sweet,” either a dance-pop diva aspirant or a maker of lush, lustful anthems.
Bawdiness reigns on “Man’s Best Friend,” even if it’s a harried version of it. Carpenter leans on heavy-handed metaphor on the light disco stomp “Tears,” about how being a nice guy pays off, and on “House Tour,” about how being a nice guy pays off … if he can see past metaphor.
Carpenter is best when playful, but not winking. Accordingly, the most effective songs here are the most literal: The Ariana Grande-esque “When Did You Get Hot?” (“I did a double take, triple take / Take me to naked Twister back at your place”) literally descends into lip-biting panting. The yacht-rock-smooth “Never Getting Laid” simply captures what it’s like to be rejected, and then do some rejecting in response to reclaim control.
More often, though, a brittleness permeates these songs. On “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” which captures the skittish EKG line of an imperfect relationship, the lyrical arc doesn’t match the melodic arc, which doesn’t match the emotional arc of the singing. On songs like “My Man on Willpower” and “Sugar Talking,” Carpenter’s syllables feel crammed into awkward spaces. (This would be less egregious had she not elegantly nailed the intonation on “Manchild,” where she doles out eighth notes like a disappointed schoolteacher.) Carpenter is a strong and performatively sweet singer, but often on this album her upper register is squeezed almost to fragility.
Like “Short n’ Sweet,” the songs on “Man’s Best Friend” were written entirely with Amy Allen. And it was produced almost wholly by Jack Antonoff, who is at his most ostentatious and refined here. (John Ryan also contributed songwriting and producing, as he did on Carpenter’s last album.)
Often, though, the mood of each song feels traceable to a very specific ancestor. The lead single “Manchild,” with its glimmering synths, oozes the spirit of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” “Nobody’s Son” reaches back stealthily to “The Tide Is High,” which Blondie turned into an ice-cool rocksteady hit in 1980. The frisky “Goodbye” practically sweats out the toxins of Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).” “House Tour” is torn between Prince worship and the carefree abandon of Stacey Q’s club-pop classic “Two of Hearts.” And there’s a light residue of Madonna’s “Justify My Love” on “When Did You Get Hot?”
A couple of songs also recall the “Grease” soundtrack, and at times Carpenter does appear destined to play an awakened Sandra Dee. On her previous album, she appeared to be shaking off an old character, but here, she appears most at ease donning a new one.
Sabrina Carpenter
“Man’s Best Friend”
(Island)
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