Historians will say it was “Espresso” that did it, however Sabrina Carpenter’s ascent to pop’s A-list actually started with “Nonsense.” At every cease on her tour behind 2022’s Emails I Can’t Ship, Carpenter carried out the track with a bespoke bonus verse incorporating a neighborhood shoutout and a sexual innuendo. “Water ain’t the one factor I swallow,” she sang to a Chicago crowd that October. By January, “Nonsense” graduated from also-ran to the album’s solely charting single, and Sabrina Carpenter as we now know her had arrived: witty, itty-bitty, somewhat smutty, dolled up like a powder-blue Peggy Lee. Now Carpenter is beloved by the traditional pop constituencies (teen women and homosexual males), whereas traditional rock’s powers that be maintain her in an esteem second solely to Olivia Rodrigo. After practically a decade within the para-Disney equipment, she’s understandably keen to maintain a superb factor going.
BRAT could have dominated the dialog in 2024, nevertheless it was Carpenter’s Brief n’ Candy that actually achieved ubiquity: At one level, its singles “Style,” “Please Please Please,” and “Espresso” occupied Nos. 2, 3, and 4 on the Scorching 100. Man’s Finest Pal arrives a yr later, nearly to the day, with comparatively little pomp. Its solely single, “Manchild,” is sneakily endearing, like an express needlepoint you’ve handed within the hallway a couple of dozen occasions earlier than bothering to cease and skim. “Fuck my life,” Carpenter coos oh-so-sweetly, “Gained’t you let an harmless lady be?” On Brief n’ Candy, she raided the costume closet—a Riviera disco diva’s sunnies, a sheer Y2K minidress, a dubiously genuine Pennsylvania twang—to seek out the one which greatest suited her. Delivering formally traditional, facepalm-clever pop songs on a timetable unseen since Rihanna’s heyday, Man’s Finest Pal takes the Sabrina persona to its apex, and possibly so far as it will probably go.
When Carpenter sings about intercourse with males, misandry begets horniness, which begets misandry. “Stranger hazard” refers to when he’s not that into you anymore; fantasies of being pregnant stay blissfully immaterial. As she goes slackjawed over a person’s fundamental competence—“Assemble a chair from IKEA, I’m like, ‘Uhhh’”—“Tears” boogies to a fidgety pressure of nu-disco pulled from the two-year window between Diana Ross’ Diana and Evelyn “Champagne” King’s Get Free. Late-album spotlight “Home Tour” namedrops Chips Ahoy! within the midst of Carpenter’s lavishly long-winded and none-too-subtle metaphor: “Yeah, I spent somewhat fortune on the waxed flooring/We is usually a little reckless ’trigger it’s insured.” It’s Madonna drag reverse-engineered by way of Madonna’s imitators—the precise form of kitsch, reference-to-a-reference transfer that must sign simply how critical Carpenter isn’t.