Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, dropped on Friday to much excitement among fans online, but it came with a warning from the US pop star herself.
“This is just fun – and that’s all it has to be,” she added of her often risqué live performances.
CBS News’s Gayle King, interviewing Carpenter, praised her “sexual, powerful, vulnerable” and “unapologetic” new music, which includes recent chart-topper Manchild and new single Tears.
But, she offered: “I think there are some people that would listen to the music and they’d be clutching their pearls.”
“Correct,” Carpenter replied. “The album is not for any pearl clutchers. But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves.”
She added: “Sometimes people hear the lyrics that are really bold and they go, ‘I don’t want to sing this in front of other people’. It’s almost… TMI.
“But I think about being at a concert, with however many young women I see in the front row that are screaming at the top of their lungs with their best friends and you can go like, we can all sigh of relief.
“This is just fun – and that’s all it has to be.”
Of the 12 tracks on her new album, nine of them are labelled as explicit.
Carpenter co-produced it with Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff, along with John Ryan, who also worked on her previous album, last year’s Grammy-winning Short n’ Sweet which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
She added that after the initial cover artwork controversy, it “would have been amazing” if the album “was in fact so subversive that it crushed the male gaze for ever, somehow positioning Carpenter as an avenging angel, a cute pocket-sized gorgon turning men to stone.
“Unfortunately, nothing here justifies that cover image.”
Reviewer Adam White wrote: “With Carpenter circling many of the same themes in her lyrics, the hit rate on Man’s Best Friend is largely dependent on its song-by-song production.
“House Tour is sensational, a chugging slice of 80s power-pop so instantly catchy that you’re able to forgive it holding some of the album’s biggest lyrical clunkers,” citing some of her more obviously suggestive wordplay.
He added Carpenter “is above all a brilliant aesthete” though and that her videos and album artwork were “uniformly inspired.”
My Newspaper Radio 1’s Newsbeat spoke to two young fans in Hertfordshire to get their initial thoughts. Amy, 21, commented: “It’s the type of album you want to dance to and drive with the windows down to.
“I love House Tour, I think it’s so fun and so theatrical. I love the whole theatre kid showgirl vibe from her.”
Guy, 20, suggested it sounded like Carpenter was “being open and in touch with her femininity” on “some sad songs” as well as having “Short n’ Sweet-vibes songs”.
The singer-songwriter celebrated the album’s release with a Spotify-hosted fan event at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
She said: “Short n’ Sweet was this magical gift; it fed me, and it fed a lot of other people in the world. It felt true to me, and it felt authentic to a lot of other people. It’s rare that those line up ever, let alone more than once.
“It unlocked my brain to know myself more and more.”
The former Disney star, 26, has built her brand around fun and risqué pop music, and her sexual lyrics and provocative performances regularly cause a stir.
She was also seen having a close encounter with a dancer dressed as a soldier wearing a bearskin hat during the show, which was broadcast live on ITV.
Last month however, My Newspaper News culture reporter Annabel Rackham noted how her performance at London’s Hyde Park had been “noticeably toned down as the US singer embraced a more family-friendly show”.
“Despite these changes she was still at her best, storming through a 17-song tracklist that comprised her biggest hits, charming the crowd with her Hollywood smile and incredibly bouncy hair.”
