Sabrina Carpenter released “Manchild” on June 5, 2025. Just over a year later, the song has already surpassed a billion streams on Spotify, gaining it entry into the platform’s vaunted Billions Club. It’s Carpenter’s sixth song to reach the billion-stream milestone on Spotify following “Espresso,” “Nonsense,” “Please Please Please,” “Taste,” and “Feather.”
“Manchild” was the lead single from Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter’s smash hit 2025 album. She co-wrote it with close collaborators Amy Allen and Jack Antonoff and co-produced it with Antonoff. “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,” she wrote on her social media accounts upon release.
Buoyed by its genre-blending musicality, Carpenter’s witty lyrics, and one of her most memorable music videos, “Manchild” rocketed straight to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in its first week, becoming her second No. 1 hit following “Please Please Please.” Later on, the song earned four Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
“It’s easily my favorite song we’ve ever done together,” Antonoff told Rolling Stone last summer. In the same feature, Carpenter reflected, “I’m always thinking about life and my music like it’s a movie. Which is such a 25-year-old thing to say. But I really never felt like more of a main character in a coming-of-age movie than when I listened to the song, and that’s how I wanted the video to feel.”
That video, directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, finds Carpenter hitchhiking around the California desert with a diverse set of men in a wide range of vehicles, as well as engaging in heists and other adventures. Animals feature heavily too. Carpenter later told Seth Meyers she extended the video shoot to three days because after two it was “not crazy enough yet.”
Shop Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend on vinyl and cassette here.
