Sabrina Carpenter takes a victory lap with Man’s Best Friend

If Short n’ Sweet gave her a blockbuster single in “Please Please Please”, Man’s Best Friend uses it as a blueprint – Jack Antonoff’s quirky gleam, the cheeky sting of Carpenter’s punch lines – and scales it into a full aesthetic replete with even more grandiose gestures and layers of innuendo. It’s the closest Carpenter has come to a signature set, a clean arc from emails i can’t send’s diaristic candour, through Short n’ Sweet’s genre-hopping, zippy provocation, to a record that radiates a confidence unmatched by any other pop album this year.

Production-wise, Man’s Best Friend is deceptively dense. “Please Please Please” now sounds spare beside the stacked harmonies and plush overdubs from Antonoff, Allen, and Ryan – with Bleachers’ backing instrumentation pushing everything further. The live-instrument tint other reviewers have clocked – strings, clavinet, agogô bells – keeps the otherwise grandiose palette tactile, which helps the camp read as craft, not just shtick. You can hear them everywhere – from the country-flecked opener, “Manchild”, to the Carly Simon-esque yacht-rock glow that softens the album’s middle third, to the ABBA nods on “My Man on His Willpower”, “Never Getting Laid”, and “Goodbye”. Carpenter, Antonoff & Co. make an undeniable case that turning up the dial on just about everything works wonders.

Carpenter continues to keep her wit as diamond-cut and flagrantly horny as ever this time around. “House Tour” is classic Sabrina: an invitation, a boundary, a wink. “Do you want the house tour? / I could take you to the first, second, third floor,” she teases, playing a coy provocateur, before puncturing the metaphor altogether – “And I promise none of this is a metaphor / I just want you to come inside” – and then drawing a line: “but never enter through the back door.” It’s grinning, choreographed innuendo that leans on the bright new-jack swing drums and the bounce of layered vocals that make it an album highlight.

But her most inspired comedic writing this round is the self-deprecating “Go Go Juice”, which starts like a track off of America’s Homecoming, then morphs into a bar-room confessional with bluegrass violins and banjos in the margins and a chorus built for drunk-dial dread. Here, Carpenter’s grammar-as-hook (last year’s gloriously absurd “that’s that me espresso”) evolves to full-on character work with syntax that staggers like the narrator – “How’s yous been? What’s up?”, “Shoulda we hooks up?”, “Bye, it’s me, how’s mm-call, do you me still love?” – and looped as a bar-chant coda until the nonsense is the point. It may read silly on paper, but it’s pure dramaturgy: slurred pronouns, mis-conjugations, the voicemail you’d regret if it weren’t so catchy. Carpenter’s flex is knowing exactly which rules to bend to sell the scene, and the stacked vocals turn a private spiral into a communal chorus of bad decisions. It’s diabolically fun, the sound of an artist letting herself cackle mid-take and leaving the evidence.

The humour sharpens into something meaner on “Never Getting Laid”, which reads like a kiss-off scrawled in the margins of a diary and then set to a sugar-rush melody. “I just wish you didn’t have a mind / that could flip like a switch… / to a neighbouring b*tch / when just the other night / you said you need me” she deadpans, and later wishes her ex a “forever of never getting laid.” The joke works because the performance does – she stretches the vowels until they sting.

If the record stumbles, it’s in how relentlessly it sells itself. The vocal layering that felt like a cleverly-placed multiplier on Short n’ Sweet now blankets every track (“Nobody’s Son” chief among them), sanding down the specificity of Carpenter’s tone. I missed those quieter moments where she lets a single, unadorned lead carry the weight. Carpenter’s vocals can devastate; emails i can’t send proved that, and a couple of stripped cuts here would have thrown the sparkle into relief. To her credit, she places needed breathers in “Sugar Talking” and “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”, pretty valleys amid the power-hour pacing.

As a follow-up, then, this is sturdy and smart: a pop album that scales up what worked before, threads a clearer sonic and thematic through-line, and still leaves room for Carpenter’s magpie instinct for genre play that dates back to emails i can’t send fwd (see “When Did You Get Hot?” and “House Tour” – both offer a brief respite, genre-wise, from the rest of the track list). If I’m dinging anything, it’s the temptation to coat every chorus in frosting, but I guess that’s also what makes Man’s Best Friend so much fun to listen to. Even when Carpenter over-ices the cake, the bite underneath is her own – funny, flirty, occasionally feral, and unmistakably Sabrina.