Sabrina goes down on her hands and knees to sell new album Man’s Best Friend. Is it worth it? Music critic Adrian Thrills ponders the question

SABRINA CARPENTER: Man’s Best Friend (Island)

Verdict: Sabrina sticks to the formula

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Sabrina Carpenter isn’t the first former Disney Channel starlet to take the entertainment giant’s family-friendly training and add a little more edge to become one of today’s biggest music stars. Miley Cyrus used a similar apprenticeship to launch a career in bad-girl country-pop, while Olivia Rodrigo used it to turn herself into a confessional rock star.

Carpenter — whose big break came in the teen comedy Girl Meets World — initially used the Disney finishing school as a jumping-off point for a fairly predictable run of bubblegum pop albums before becoming more daring with 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send and further upping the ante on last year’s Short n’ Sweet, a raunchy affair built around the huge hit singles Espresso and Please Please Please.

There’s more to grab the attention on her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend, which takes up from where Short n’ Sweet left off, while adding more innuendo, swear words and other lines that leave little to the imagination as she delivers pointed insights into the dating game against a backdrop of disco, R&B, country and Abba-leaning pop.

Cover story: Carpenter has defended the artwork on Man’s Best Friend, which shows her on her knees having her hair yanked by a faceless man. She has since released alternative covers

Carpenter, 26, has warned that the record is ‘not for the pearl clutchers’, and she set the tone in June when she revealed an album sleeve showing her in a submissive pose, kneeling in a black mini dress with her hair being pulled by a faceless man in a suit. Some felt the image was demeaning to women, while others saw it as satire. But it achieved its primary aim in whipping up a media storm reminiscent of the ones created by Madonna in her heyday — and Sabrina has since released three alternative, less controversial album covers.

Some characteristically risqué lyrics maintain a salacious approach here. ‘I just want you to come … but never enter through the back door,’ she sings on House Tour, before teasing that an old male friend has a lightning rod that’s bigger than Zeus’s on When Did You Get Hot?. The double entendres can get tiresome, although it’s clear that her tongue is firmly in her cheek as she delivers lines worthy of a West End farce.

As for the music, there’s some good pop, despite a nagging suspicion that her regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, who co-produced the album with fellow American John Ryan, is starting to spread his talent too thinly: in the past two years, he’s made records with Lana Del Rey, Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift, while fronting his own retro-pop band, Bleachers.

The album begins strongly, with Sabrina’s sense of humour to the fore as she skewers the limited intellect of a hapless male admirer on Manchild. ‘Why so sexy if so dumb?,’ she asks, sarcastically. ‘And how survive the Earth so long?’

Disney princess: Carpenter began her career in teen comedy Girl Meets World and has used that as a launchpad for her successful move into the world of music

Hitching a ride: Carpenter’s raunchy new album has attracted controversy, but also fuelled interest in the artist, who first came to fame as a Disney starlet

Elsewhere, My Man On Willpower feels melodically undercooked, and the oompah-like Nobody’s Son strives to sound like Abba, but has more in common with their fellow Swedes Ace Of Base.

In February, Carpenter duetted with Dolly Parton on a remake of 2024’s Please Please Please, and the best moments here find her turning to country again. Sugar Talking is a soulful, if syrupy, ballad, and Go Go Juice a witty endorsement of alcohol as a social lubricant — a timely topic in a week during which Sabrina became the new face of Scottish whisky brand Johnnie Walker.

Arriving just over a year after Short n’ Sweet, Man’s Best Friend finds Carpenter sticking to what she does best without delivering a knockout blow on a par with 2024’s Espresso. But, alongside her guest appearance on the title track of her friend Taylor Swift’s forthcoming The Life Of A Showgirl album, it’s another staging post on her seemingly unstoppable rise to superstardom.

SUEDE: Antidepressants (BMG)

Verdict: Swaggering return

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Playing London’s Southbank Centre last month, Suede singer Brett Anderson stressed that his Britpop-era survivors were ‘the anti-nostalgia band’. And the group are true to their frontman’s words on new album Antidepressants, a sequel to 2022’s Autofiction that sees them shying away from playing the nostalgia card. Suede are now veterans, but they possess the raw enthusiasm of a much younger band.

This release was originally going to be an ambitious concept album. After touring in support of Autofiction, Anderson and his bandmates wrote new songs with a view to working with a ballet company and producing a piece of performance art. But they were so fired up by playing live again after the pandemic that they changed tack to make an album of surging rock music.

The results are wonderfully vibrant. Disintegrate, its title a nod to The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, is an uplifting guitar anthem about learning to live with one’s own mortality. Dancing With The Europeans, a song about human connection that was inspired by the bond between the band and their fans at a gig in Spain, is an homage to the power of playing live.

With that forceful early tempo rarely slackening, Sweet Kid is about Brett’s relationship with his 12-year-old son, and The Sound And The Summer about Thelma & Louise-style escape.

No nostalgia here: Brett Anderson, frontman of Suede, plays to the crowd at the Southbank Centre, where the band are doing a residency to promote new album Antidepressants

We are ten tracks in before we reach the first of the album’s two ballads, the partly-spoken June Rain, before a suitably epic finale arrives in Life Is Endless, Life Is A Moment.

‘We got the bit between our teeth, and completely changed what we were originally going to do,’ says Anderson. ‘We basically went and wrote a whole new record. Suede are a band, not an art project. Sometimes we meander into those things, like making ballet albums… but we always snap back into being a rock band.’

Suede continue their Southbank Centre residency on September 13 at the Royal Festival Hall. They start a UK tour on January 30, 2026, at Leas Cliff Hall, Folkestone (suede.co.uk).