The “Busy Woman” is back at it. Sabrina Carpenter has announced her next album, “Man’s Best Friend” is to be released August 28, 2025. Carpenter shared the album’s cover and release date on social media on June 11 and was met with mixed reactions from fans.
The album’s cover art depicts Carpenter on all fours with an out-of-frame man holding her hair up. Fans were quick to respond, commenting things like “Oh no no no girlfriend, this is the opposite of what we’re doing in 2025,” and “This isn’t satire, this is not empowering to women. You’ve missed the mark by so much hun.” Other fans have praised her irony and subversiveness, defending the cover art as satirical.
The album’s announcement was coupled with a cover issue of Rolling Stone, featuring Carpenter’s signature scandalous and sexual imagery. The social media posts for the article received similarly mixed reactions from fans, with comments ranging from, “Such a pick me,” or “Who the hell is telling this girl she gotta be naked everywhere damn… i blame her team,” to “A lot of her songs are about sex. Can you guys get over the fact that she’s a woman comfortable with her sexuality? There is never this much negative discourse about other artists wearing little to no clothing. She’s a grown woman.”
The lead single for the album, “Manchild,” is a synth-pop summer hit with a little bit of country twang. Carpenter teased clips from the song’s music video in the days prior to its release.
She shared a post on Instagram about the track, describing it as “the song embodiment of a loving eye roll and it feels like a never-ending road trip in the summer.” The music video, directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, follows this description, with Carpenter hitchhiking her way across a desert. The music video has received much higher praise in those comments than on her Instagram, and the video has earned over 25 million views within the first 10 days.
Despite fans’ mixed reactions to the album and Rolling Stone images, “Manchild” has seen nothing short of the expected success. The track hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100 charts by gaining 6.8 million streams in the first week, dethroning Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” which has sat there for 12 weeks straight.
Personally, I believe that the scandalous and obvious sexuality is what we’ve come to expect from Sabrina since her “Short n’ Sweet” era. Even some of her earliest works center around sensual themes; before her sexual “Juno” poses on the “Short n’ Sweet” tour, fans praised her scandalous ad-libbed “Nonsense” outros during the “Emails I Can’t Send” tour.
The cheeky outros from her 2022/23 tour included lyrics such as “all about the balls I’m Cinderella/ Only use my mouth that’s acapella” or “turn that d*ck to stone, call me Medusa/ Choking on him, need Heimlich maneuver,”— not such a far cry from the themes of the “Man’s Best Friend” rollout so far. Either way, I’m a big fan of the first single, which has hit most of my summer playlists, and I’m excited to hear what’s next from Sabrina.
