It was a savvy move back in February when Sabrina Carpenter released a country remix of her 2024 summer hit “Please Please Please” that featured Dolly Parton. Not just because Carpenter is a genre-fluid performer and country-pop crossovers have been “in” for the past couple of years. Her commonalities with Parton have much deeper (dyed) roots.
“She looks like she could be my little sister,” the 79-year-old icon said of the 26-year-old Carpenter to Rolling Stone in June, the magazine pointing out that each is “a five-foot-tall blonde with serious pipes.” The stronger link it overlooked is that both Carpenter and Parton are virtuosi of high-femme camp, particularly playing the role of the sexpot savant, the bombshell who’s really a brainiac. They’re in line there with the recently deceased Loni Anderson as Jennifer on the 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, the leggy radio-station receptionist who’s secretly the mastermind running the place. Tracing back further, all three lifted their wiggle-with-a-knowing-wink from Marilyn Monroe, while refusing to be misused the way she was.
As Parton sang on her very first country hit in 1967, “This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool”—or as Carpenter put it on “Please Please Please” in much more 2020s terms, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker.”
That song, as well as the bubbling “Espresso,” made last summer into Carpenter’s breakout season, which she capped by releasing the album Short n’ Sweet in late August, proving she had plenty more salty reports from the dating scene up her sleeve, or wherever she could stash them in her barely there outfits. Her popularity has only continued to escalate this year, by some measures faster than any other current pop star.
She ran into a speed bump early this summer when she unveiled the cover art for her new album Man’s Best Friend; some feminist critics were alarmed by her subservient pose, kneeling before an unseen man with his hand pulling at her hair. But only someone who hadn’t listened much to Carpenter’s previous songs could fail to get the point, given the album title, that the image was about men treating women like dogs—with perhaps a side dish of self-recrimination for too often playing along.
If any confusion remains, it should be cleared up now that the full record is here. Sure enough, it proves to be another machine-gun round of chronicles from the trenches of heterofatalism. It’s a landscape Carpenter sketches colorfully, but one so bleak it’s astonishing she manages to be as perky as she is about it. Perhaps she’s stretching herself a bit thin in the process. Like the self-descriptive Short n’ Sweet, this album checks in with a dozen songs in under 40 minutes, refreshingly refusing to game the streaming system with bloated packages of bonus tracks and the like, but it doesn’t quite manage the frictionless charm of its predecessor.
It’s still full of wit, sass, and hooks, but a few B-grade songs drag down the momentum. Carpenter and her collaborators—the core Short n’ Sweet team of co-songwriter Amy Allen with producers Jack Antonoff and John Ryan—occasionally seem to strain to pull more fresh sex bunnies out of the same top hat. This is unsurprising. Functionally Man’s Best Friend is in the same position as a typical “difficult” second album, hurriedly following up to capitalize on a breakout success, even though (because Carpenter was part of the Disney Channel ranks from the age of 14), it’s technically her seventh.
The biggest misstep here to me is actually the very first track and only advance single, “Manchild.” It hits too many of the same boyz R stoopid thematic notes as Short n’ Sweet songs like “Slim Pickins,” “Sharpest Tool,” “Dumb & Poetic,” and of course “Please Please Please.” And it hits them with a way-too-heavy mallet. With its 1980s keyboard stabs and blaring orchestra hits, and its Taylor-ish spoken-word vamping about finding a “cuter word” for “useless,” it reeks of a group of people trying way too hard to make a hit. In strict terms, they succeeded, but the song debuted at No. 1 only on the strength of preexisting pro-Sabrina goodwill, before quickly slipping out of the Top 10. It soon became another of the many also-rans in 2025’s summer-without-a-song-of-the-summer, the anticlimax to 2024’s summer-song surfeit, which was in no small part thanks to Carpenter.
That’s especially a shame because I think she might have had a chance at reiterating last year’s heatwave if they’d put out second track “Tears” back in June. Instead it was launched as a single last night, including a Rocky Horror–style video complete with Colman Domingo as its Frank-N-Furter. It’s a perfect example of Carpenter’s femme-camp subversions: a Donna Summer–style disco jam in which the singer gets hot, bothered, and quite frankly “wet” (the titular droplets are not running down her face) over fantasies of men behaving responsibly, doing dishes, and assembling Ikea furniture, not to mention—oh my!—communicating respectfully. With luck it’s not too late now for the song to get huge, which I dearly hope it does, if only so we all can turn to our friends in moments of stress and stage-whisper, “Dance break!”
That song kicks off a winning run. Next comes “My Man on Willpower,” which smartly flips the “Tears” theme: Now it’s a boyfriend who’s gotten too responsible, preoccupied with work ambitions and neglecting her even when she puts on her “slutty pajamas”—“he fell in love with self-restraint/ and now it’s getting out of hand.” Then “Sugar Talking” comes in with a few scoops of country pop à la Parton, Kacey Musgraves, and even Shania Twain, telling a guy who’s all talk and no commitment: “Your paragraphs mean shit to me/ It’s verbatim what you said last week.” (I hear that from my editor all the time.)
I’m less taken with “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” which feels as disposable as the on-off relationship it laments. But things pick back up with “Nobody’s Son,” which disses another dud of a dude—including a bridge that directs the slams at his parents—with a light Caribbean pulse emanating straight from Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” You betcha Debbie Harry is another member of that Marilyn-Dolly-Loni-Sabrina line, one way or another.
The next few songs all have clever concepts but lack the ease and sparkle of Carpenter’s best. I particularly want to like the drunk-dialing anthem “Go Go Juice,” if only for its willingness to put a full-on Nashville-country, Miranda Lambert–style tequila-swiggin’ song in the middle of a pop album, and for its lyrical descent into sloshed English (“Bye, it’s me/ How’s mm-call/ Do you me still love?”). But the verses are too reedy and the shout-along bridge too shouty. And that title? Just no.
However, the record pulls strong into the finish. On “House Tour,” Carpenter invites a fella in after that miracle of miracles, a successful date, and offers to show him around her abode—by which she means her body, as she makes plain via increasingly brazen and ridiculous double entendres: “I promise none of this is a metaphor,” she winks. “I just want you to come inside—but never enter through the back door.” And by the way, “I spent a little fortune on the waxed floors.” But the clincher is that it’s also a house tour in the sense of house music, as this whole suite of puns plays out over a post-disco, four-on-the-floor beat. Ridiculous. Glorious.
Finally, fittingly, comes “Goodbye,” about a guy who breaks up with her but keeps trying to come back, to which Carpenter replies multilingually that goodbye means goodbye, as in, “Sayonara, adiós/ On the flip side, cheerio!” and, “Arrivederci, au revoir/ Forgive my French, but fuck you, ta-ta!” All of which is just the flimsiest excuse for the most flagrant ABBA tribute you’ve ever heard in your life. There are “Voulez-Vous”–style “ah-hah!” exclamations in the verses over shimmery piano runs. There are galloping rhythms with a mild Latin tinge in the choruses à la “Fernando.” There are big exclamatory harmonies as on, well, every ABBA song. Everyone involved sounds like they are having the times of their lives, and of Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid’s lives too.
It’s custom-built to make a great concert closer—that is, the faux concert closer before Carpenter comes back onstage to encore with, let’s face it, “Please Please Please” and “Espresso.” There’s plenty of music to love on Man’s Best Friend, along with all the loser males to love to hate, but this sequel is not going to outstrip the original. That might not be solely down to the strength of the album, but also to whether it catches the moment. Where last year Carpenter was a big radio-pop enhancement to “brat summer,” in the crazy world of 2025 her love-trouble anthems might not amount to quite so much of a hill of beans. It might not prove to be exactly this year’s model of escapist fun. But no matter. As proved by many of Carpenter’s forebears in blond ambition (aha, there’s another one), sass and sensuality can be great resources of resilience. I don’t think she’s going anywhere, so long as the peroxide holds out.
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