Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild

Goddamn, manchild. You f— oh, sorry, wrong tune.

There’s a reason “Manchild” dropped without a single word of context — no real advance announcement, no hint as to what “era” it belongs to. Not an accident. What we’re witnessing here is a test balloon: will Short n’ Sweet 2.0 fly? Will another track in the same sugary, ironical style chart well enough to justify a full follow-up? Quick turnaround, minimal commitment. Strike while the iron is still hot. And it is hot — Short n’ Sweet is, at the time of writing, sitting at #1 on the UK albums chart, and its tracks are doing impressively well worldwide.

Yeah, okay: we were overdue for a summer hit. And Sabrina Carpenter (or her team) — sensing the gap — jumps in with her offering, accompanied by her pocket-sized Jack Antonoff, who, fresh off his brilliant work with Kendrick Lamar, seemingly had no trouble printing out another Sabrina Carpenter song in the style of Sabrina Carpenter. Except this time, it also sounds like she’s covering Chappell Roan — and the internet is absolutely right to draw that comparison.

The result? Cute. Listenable. Fine. Much like most of Short n’ Sweet. But that album, at least, was a first for Sabrina — her leap into heavy commercial pop stardom. So what’s this, then?

At this point, maybe it's time we just let “Pink Pony Club” — a five-year-old track — become the Song of the Summer 2025, which, frankly, feels more deserved and increasingly inevitable.

“Manchild” sounds exactly like a song you’d imagine Sabrina Carpenter would release. That’s not necessarily a compliment. There’s a faint country twang — another genre everyone is scrambling into, whether it fits or not — and the now-standard Carpenter synths. She can’t really be faulted for using those sounds on Short n’ Sweet, since that was her first full embrace of this glossy pop aesthetic — but now we’re moving forward, right?

Right???

5.8/10