Sabrina Carpenter’s highly anticipated seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, is now available to stream. For the occasion, she also dropped a music video for “Tears,” the album’s second single. Carpenter has become known for her playful vintage aesthetic, risqué lyrics and for featuring acclaimed actors in her music videos. “Tears” does just that. She decided to tap Colman Domingo for the project.
“When @sabrinacarpenter calls, you play,” he wrote on Instagram alongside several snapshots of his drag-inspired looks sported throughout the music video.
A music video honoring the drag scene of the 1970s and 1980s
The video for “Tears” opens on Carpenter dressed in a 1940s-inspired blue skirt suit and a white wide-brimmed hat. She survives a car crash, and her seemingly dead boyfriend is lying in the driver’s seat. She makes her way to an abandoned-looking house on the side of the road and is met with Domingo dressed in a cropped pinstripe suit.
“A little initiative can go a very long, long way,” Carpenter sings. “Baby, just do the dishes, I’ll give you what you want.”
The artist sings and dances in a funhouse of characters dressed in drag. The music video features 1970s and 1980s lingerie outfits, drag looks and colorful makeup reminiscent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Carpenter and Domingo perform a short shimmying dance number during the video.
Sabrina Carpenter says her new album is ‘not for any pearl clutchers’
The project features 12 tracks, 10 of which are explicit. Carpenter previously released “Manchild,” the album’s lead single, which charted at No. 1 upon its release.
“The album is not for any pearl clutchers,” she told Gayle King in an interview, according to Variety. “But I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves.”
Carpenter also shared some of the creative process that led to the album.
It was “all about sort of embracing spontaneity, all about embracing impulses that I was having and experiences that I was having that were really urgent to write about. … And knowing that if I didn’t make this album and have it represent the chapter of my life that it represents, that it would have never been this album. It would have turned into something else, and I think that would have done it as a service to the album.”
