Nobody expected Sabrina Carpenter to return this quickly. One year and six days after releasing Short n’ Sweet — her commercial breakthrough that elevated her to arena headliner, the album that spawned her first No. 1 single and Grammy award, the project that contained four radio smashes, the moment that a longtime entertainer became a household name — she’s already back with its follow-up, Man’s Best Friend.
Instead of basking in the glow of a pivotal moment, Carpenter has moved on to a new era — yet anyone paying attention to her greater trajectory understands that this new album is not a cash grab, or victory lap. After spending years as a Disney Channel star and even more as a prolific pop ingenue searching for a wider audience, Carpenter has discovered her true potential, and grabbed hold of her aesthetic. She’s not letting go anytime soon.
As such, Man’s Best Friend finds Carpenter fully locked in to her current groove — writing the songs she wants to write (funny, sneakily heartfelt reflections on love and lust), operating within her preferred sound (huge, mainstream-focused pop flecked with rhythmic curiosities), working with the people who know how to unlock her creativity (Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen and John Ryan). If the general outline of Man’s Best Friend marks a continuation of the winning playbook of Short n’ Sweet, the deepening of Carpenter’s artistic persona is what separates, and elevates, her latest project from its predecessor.
Carpenter was always the type of knowingly quirky pop star that was able to effortlessly use a word like “agoraphobia” in a chorus, but Man’s Best Friend is by far her most idiosyncratic album yet, full of self-possessed and unabashedly sexual lyricism, genre explorations via nifty instrumental hooks, and vocal takes ranging from sarcastic whispers to large-hearted cries. As much as she’s dominated the mainstream over the past 18 months, Carpenter is still abiding by her weirdo-pop impulses, being driven to make music that only she can make — and the results are often spectacular. Let’s hope she doesn’t stop anytime soon.
While all of Man’s Best Friend is worth absorbing, here is a preliminary ranking of every song on Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album.
from Billboard https://ift.tt/xgYCvfD
