Day 284: Sabrina Carpenter – Mans Best Friend
Ever since lockdown, I’ve been very dedicated to being a DIY diva and doing everything that could be done in a salon myself – granted, that led to about four years of me looking busted all the time, but I’ve finally got the hang of it. Sort of. Anyway, I need a girlypop album for when I colour my hair and probably end up looking like I’m from a Northern European painting from the 1800s of a lady tilling the fields, so it seems like it’s finally time for me to tackle Sabrina Carpenter.
Album covevr courtesy of Island Records
Sabrina Carpenter is a former child star who first rose to fame on the Disney Channel, but who’s been actively working away at a music career for more than a decade, having released her first single in 2014. Her music career started taking taking off in 2021 when she signed with Island Records and released her fifth studio album, Emails I Can't Send. The album gained her worldwide recognition and she became an opener on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
Mans Best Friend was released in 2025 as her seventh studio album, co-produced by her, Jack Antonoff and John Ryan. It earned her six Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. It was also a massive commercial hit, getting to number one in the charts in more than ten countries and breaking the record for the most streams in a day by a female artist in 2025.
I’ve got to be honest, it’s taken me ages to listen to a Sabrina album, even though I know how highly the pop girlies rank her. I’d heard her singles and thought it seems like nice, uncomplicated pop music, but there’s clearly a bit more depth to her than originally seems. It’s an album of breezy country-pop that relies a lot on the joke-y storytelling of the songwriting, mainly centred around Sabrina Carpenter being a little bit unlucky in love and relationships.
It very much follows her whole image and vibe as an artist,. I see her as kind of like a 2020s version of artists like Samantha Fox, except when they were doing the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sexual innuendo songs, that was marketed to men. Sabrina’s version of it is clearly for the girls, with her retro-glamorous look and giggling sex-kitten image also being a way for her to poke fun at herself. And despite her camp sex appeal, she doesn’t seem to have a fanbase of straight men – maybe because with what she’s doing, the joke is kind of on them and not on the women.
There’s something nice about how when the young men are becoming more conservative than the generations that came before them, young women are fighting back in their own way. Social media is heralding this age of Gen Z boys and men thinking that women should only have sex when married, and when they get married they should submit and obey their husbands. That’s not hyperbole, a study found that more than 30% of teens or men in their 20s think that a wife “should always obey her husband”, while only 13% of men over 60 agreed. You’ll find endless patter online with men with podcast mics telling boys about what young women are and aren’t allowed to do.
All the while, young Gen Z women and girls are the most progressive generation to ever have existed. When the cultural conversation and social media is so focused on harping on about how they need to dress modestly and save themselves for marriage, there’s Sabrina Carpenter on stage in a corset, joking about her sex life. That must be refreshing.
I’m not necessarily her target audience and even though it’s nice to listen to, her music isn’t strictly speaking my thing. But I still find her whole thing endearing. She reminds me a bit of Dolly Partony, with her storytelling, her sense of humour and her showmanship with the visual part of her schtick. It’s a fun album, Mans Best Friend is an 8/10 for me.