Just 371 days after her breakthrough album, Sabrina Carpenter controversially returns to music in full throttle — with a flirty, fun, chaotic, and cheeky pop album packed with great hooks and hits.
Carpenter discussed extensively about the lack of pressure she felt while crafting this album. It’s the tale as old as time — a woman in pop music has an incredibly successful record, and no matter what she releases next, it will be ripped apart by the masses. In spite of this, Carpenter, alongside producers Jack Antonoff, John Ryan, and Amy Allen, continued creating music without taking the public’s perception into consideration. This is audibly clear, and there’s some sort of carefree energy that translates into the listening experience.
Although the instrumentals stray a little further away from the pure pop sound, the funky beats and compelling melodies tend to work better to display her vocal abilities, and the lyric-heavy nature of the songs is the puzzle piece that ties everything together. Songs like ‘My Man on Willpower’ and ‘Go Go Juice’ bring a country twang that frequently appeared on Short n Sweet, yet others like ‘Sugar Talking’ and ‘When Did You Get Hot?’ go back to the R&B influences found all over her Singular and EVOLution albums.
The biggest theme of the LP surrounds Carpenter’s complicated relationships with men, and serves as a critique about the men she chooses. On the lead single and intro ‘Manchild’ she cries out “I like my men all incompetent, and I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them”, which was a great introduction for the topics at hand. Later down the tracklist, she confesses to her toxic and sabotaging behavior on ‘Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry’ claiming “emotional lottery is all you’ll ever get from me” — effectively shifting the perspective on how much fault she puts on herself for entering these relationships. There’s a raw honesty within the lyricism, and it proves to be relatable to the masses because of all of the different, complex emotions she feels about the men she has dated. It steps down from the pedestal she put herself on, and it’s unequivocally human.
Since Antonoff’s work on tracks like ‘Please Please Please’, many listeners online have urged Carpenter to step away from working with him on her albums, in a similar way that the internet bullied artists like Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Clairo for having him produce their albums. As a Jack-Antonoff-truther myself, it pains me to say, but I have to agree. The tracks where she and Antonoff worked together on are definitely my favorites on the record — however, it seems like they have taken their work together as far as it can go. Exhausting their chemistry even more would begin to sound repetitive and I (along with the majority of the internet) would love to see what she could do with other producers. Overall, if you hate this album, you might just have to listen again. Or you might just hate fun.