The music video will have to wait till Friday morning, but Sabrina Carpenter dropped the audio version of her new single, “Manchild,” Thursday evening, and initial responses were strong, with some fans confidently predicting the upbeat number is strong enough to contend in the Song of the Summer race. Even if not every guy will necessarily be singing along.
Carpenter talked about the creation of the song in an Instagram post. “I wrote ‘Manchild’ on a random Tuesday with Amy and Jack not too long after finishing ‘Short n’ Sweet’ and it ended up being the best random Tuesday of my life,” the singer wrote, referring to Jack Antonoff — who co-produced the track with her — and Amy Allen.
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“Not only was it so fun to write, but this song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life. It sounds like the song embodiment of a loving eye roll and it feels like a never ending road trip in the summer! Hence why i wanted to give it to you now — so you can stick your head out the car window and scream it all summer long!”
She concluded, “Thank you always and forever for listening” — although she added a P.S. that indicated not everyone out there is such a good listener: “And thank you men for testing me!!”
The new tune is very much in the tradition of “Please, Please, Please” and other songs that have found Carpenter putting members of the opposite sex in their collective place.
Following an introductory, ’80s-sounding synth riff that sounds almost straight out of “What a Fool Believes,” Carpenter comically lays into one fool in particular. “Manchild, why you always come a-runnin’ to me?” she sings. “Fuck my life, won’t you let an innocent woman be? / Never heard of self-care / Half your brain just ain’t there…” But she takes some credit for her own poor choices: “Oh, I like my boys playin’ hard to get / And I like my men all incompetent.”
The video will not come out till Friday at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT, but fans already have a pretty strong indicator of how it’ll start off, with both a brief teaser video and the single’s digital cover portraying Carpenter hitchhiking in the southwestern desert in high heels and the world’s shortest short-shorts.
The song is widely assumed to be the first single from Carpenter’s seventh album, although no actual news has been promised along those lines. Her IG comments saying she just wanted to put it out for summer could be a deflection against expectations that any full-length project is immediately looming, especially when the deluxe version of her last album is still a weekly staple of the Billboard 200 chart.
As she did with her mega hit “Espresso” for Coachella last year, Carpenter will likely give the song its live debut during her festival appearance at Primavera Sound in Barcelona on Friday.
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