Every week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week column spotlights the best new tracks from the last seven days. Find our new favorites on our Top Songs playlist, and for more great songs from emerging artists, listen to our New Sounds playlist. This week, Sabrina Carpenter quips about a pattern in her past romances.
“Why so sexy if so dumb?” Sabrina Carpenter asks coyly on her new single, “Manchild,” hitting at a recurring theme found in her recent releases: What’s the deal with all these hot dudes being absolute tools?
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Sure, it’s easy to read the song as Carpenter following up on the promise given to her now-ex-boyfriend Barry Keoghan on “Please Please Please” (“If you don’t wanna cry to my music/ Don’t make me hate you prolifically”), but even disregarding any real-life context, “Manchild” serves as another sonic thesis statement from a pop star at the very top of her game.
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Related VideoShort n’ Sweet offered the similarly-countrified “Slim Pickins” and “Please Please Please” — also co-writes from Carpenter’s now-trusty duo of Jack Antonoff and Amy Allen — but “Manchild” has a bit more pep in its step. The track’s syncopated synths and strum-heavy acoustic guitar show that Carpenter is not interested in wallowing, but “Manchild” isn’t a full-fledged disco celebration either; instead, Carpenter skewers her half-witted beau while hinting that she’s maybe, perhaps, ever-so-slightly accountable, too.
“Oh, I like my boys playing hard to get/ And I like my men all incompetent/ And I swear they choose me/ I’m not choosing them,” she sings with a wink, recalling a similar conclusion drawn in “Slim Pickins” about her own inability to choose men with long-term relationship potential. Like the hitchhike-through-mayhem absurdity found in the music video, Carpenter knows the cycle well: They meet, it’s thrilling, dangerous even, and eventually, despite her telling herself things could be different this time, he lets her down. “It’s all just so familiar,” she sings.
Her lyrics are once again endearingly funny — “If I’m not there it won’t get done/ I choose to blame your mom,” Carpenter quips — and more proof that the trio of Carpenter, Allen, and Antonoff have nailed the SabCarp formula. There’s a nostalgic, comforting air, circa late ’70s and early ’80s, which fits with Carpenter’s retro-themed stage movements and music videos. There’s a slight country twang, which allows Carpenter to slip into a more casual and authentic singing style. And, above all, there’s a sharp, halfway-out-the-door wit that instantly puts the listener in Carpenter’s corner.
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Humor, used as often as Carpenter employs it, can start to feel like a defense mechanism — like she’s masking her vulnerability. Perhaps there are some meatier epiphanies to come, but in the meantime, she shrugs off a helpless himbo so well on “Manchild” that you’d have to believe she’s landed on her feet. Better off, even.
— Paolo RagusaAssociate Editor
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