On Aug. 29, 2025, pop singer Sabrina Carpenter released her seventh studio album titled “Man’s Best Friend.” The discourse around this album has been overwhelmingly negative, and listeners have shamed Carpenter for many aspects of this album, from the cover being Carpenter herself being dragged by a man, all the way to the actual content of some of the songs. 

When the album cover was initially released on June 25th of 2025, it was met with intense backlash from the internet for being crude and harmful for women, especially young women, to see something like that. In an article from Forbes Magazine, a Scottish advocacy group for women experiencing domestic violence said Carpenter’s album cover “isn’t edgy, it’s regressive, and that it evokes tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control.” 

While some people saw this as an overreaction, the majority of people agreed with the sentiment. There are other ways to depict what the singer was attempting to do, and unfortunately for her, she went about it the wrong way.

I have to agree with the majority. I felt the cover was distasteful and an obvious grab at publicity, so people are talking about the album. Not only does Carpenter herself have experience within the industry and understands public perception, but she also has a public relations team working with her who would also understand the ramifications of this situation.

Listeners were going back and forth on social platforms like X and Reddit, on whether or not this cover was to empower women and done the wrong way, or if it was a thoughtless, harmful way of depicting a woman, and that Carpenter should have known better. 

When you are in the public eye, as Carpenter is, you must know who your audience is. While this is not necessarily a criticism of the sexual aspects of lyrics or music videos, it is a simple ask that someone with such a huge platform take into consideration what they put out into the world. This is especially important if, without context, it looks like a woman is being dragged by her hair by a man.

An alternative to that could have been one, an actual dog, or two, Carpenter herself, possibly holding onto herself; in today’s day and age of great technology, a simple fix in Photoshop could have turned that seemingly anti-feminist cover into something that is more camp and artsy. Moving away from the cover, we have arrived at the actual contents of the album. 

While people seemed to be more open to the album once it came out, there was still a huge discourse online of how Carpenter, once again, is putting men into a position of power and seemingly praising them for the bare minimum. In one of the album’s lead singles, “Tears” the lyrics are all about how when men perform the bare minimum that is expected of them, the singer is turned on, writing lyrics such as “I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy” and “Just do the dishes, I’ll give you what you want”. While the listeners understand what the singer was trying to achieve with these sentiments, the songs come off as male-centric, and it angered many of her listeners online. 

In reality, these acts and services are already expected from women, but when men do these things, it means they are a deserving partner and are rewarded with sex. Finally, Carpenter’s album is being heavily compared to her fifth studio album, her first big album, “Emails I can’t send.” In comparison to this album, “Emails I Can’t Send” is a much more fleshed-out and well-written album than “Man’s Best Friend.”

The album ranges from songs about her absent father to her public humiliation when the Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett drama went down in 2020. Fans felt that the album was much more diverse and had some aspects of what “Man’s Best Friend” would be without being so centered around the appeasement of a man.

In my own opinion, I enjoyed this album, not as much as “Emails I Can’t Send” or “Short n’ Sweet,” but I do feel some of the songs are fun and true pop songs. However, I do agree with the general discourse about the album cover, and I wish that Carpenter had gone with something more artsy and not as graphic to tell the story of the album. I actually thought it was a great concept, but her execution was not. 

I enjoyed the idea of the album being called “Man’s Best Friend”, with some songs being a guide for things to understand about some women. I especially enjoyed the song “Don’t worry, I’ll Make you Worry”, a song about all the ways Carpenter was going to make this man worry about whether or not she would play with his heart or not. Songs like that one would have been a better route to take with the album concept, “Man’s Best Friend,” as in she is the man who is playing the dirty tricks on the woman.

My main problem with this album was the cover, but a close second was how messy a metaphor it was. There were too many underlying meanings being pulled from the title, and if Carpenter had stuck to one “this is what the title is really saying” theme, it would have made the album more cohesive. 

Although there is a lot of criticism and disappointment, the album has done fairly well for its first two weeks being out, with the songs “Nobody’s Son”, “My Man on Willpower”, and even the first lead single “Man Child” all being on Billboard’s Hot 100. What did you think of the album? And do you feel like Carpenter took it too far, or is the internet being overly sensitive? 

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