Madonna & Sabrina Carpenter – Bring Your Love

Happy Pride Month!

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[4.78]Josh Winters: The pairing of a legacy pop deity and her sharpest descendant should feel like a cultural collision, but “Bring Your Love” plays out like a polite, over-engineered negotiation. There’s a clinical, almost anxious neatness to Madonna & Stuart Price’s production; every synth swell feels meticulously calculated, and the vocal layers are buffed down to a sterile, high-gloss sheen. Madge anchors the track with her heavily processed late-career detachment, leaving Sabrina to maneuver the verses with her signature conversational wink. They’re trying to sell a fantasy of intoxicating desire, yet the actual chemistry feels entirely intellectualized — an exercise in immaculate aesthetics over genuine friction. And yet, there’s something hypnotic about how safely it operates. You can see the blueprint of the hook working perfectly, and while you never actually feel the heat, the sheer icy elegance of the waiting room they’ve built makes you want to linger anyway.
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Claire Davidson: I should’ve seen a Madonna/Sabrina Carpenter collaboration coming the moment Madge arrived at Carpenter’s Coachella set; in retrospect, given how reliably Carpenter has won the affection of her musical elders, a duet with the architect of modern pop stardom feels so obvious I’m embarrassed I didn’t predict it myself. That embarrassment, though, at least serves to elicit more emotion from me than “Bring Your Love” itself, a standard “Show Me Love”-lite house track whose energy never rises beyond the level of “modestly upbeat.” Madonna, suffocated by the same anonymizing vocal filters that swallowed “I Feel So Free,” sounds as sedated here as she did on her previous single, an approach that attains even less potency on a track with such an insistent hook. Sabrina Carpenter fares even worse in trying to accommodate Madonna: where her delivery is typically exaggerated with a faint degree of camp, here, she attempts to cultivate distance with a muted, sultry purr, one that still can’t manufacture the mystique needed to sound as aloof as her foremother. Without much in the way of distinct performances, one is forced to direct their attention to the lyrics, which, when not trafficking in obvious dance-music clichés, are genuinely kind of bizarre — what is one supposed to make of the oblique references to “know[ing] where the bodies are buried” and “[doing] it all for love”? If anything, those lines call to mind a song that isn’t dance-oriented at all: SZA’s “Kill Bill,” a track with infinitely more dynamism and verse than this plasticized house simulacrum.
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Alfred Soto: Unable to summon Beyonce’s plummy pyrotechnics for her own callback to the early ’90s house she once mercilessly pillaged, Madonna hovers like a spirit of malign encouragement, for Sabrina Carpenter is not my idea of a house singer. The chorus is solid. Each gets off one good line apiece (“Don’t try to distract me with numbers,” sure, and “Don’t rely on my moral compass,” hell yeah).
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Al Varela: To answer my previous Madonna blurb… It wasn’t. Marginally better, but Sabrina is a really poor fit for this kind of house track. The hook isn’t sticky, Madonna feels just as checked out and bland as she was on “I Feel So Free”, and while I don’t dislike the idea of the two of them making a song about “the gossip”, there’s nothing in here that I find terribly interesting or salacious. It’s just kinda nothing.
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Will Adams: When Madonna snarls “Do you believe in love? ‘Cause I got something to say about it!” in the opening of “Express Yourself,” I believe it. “Bring Your Love” paraphrases that line as “I got something I wanna talk about” with a fraction of the conviction or energy. There’s no getting around Madonna’s processed-to-oblivion vocal, but there’s very little in the way of melody or production razzle-dazzle to pick up the slack.
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Andrew Karpan: An argument that doesn’t make any sense but is admirable nevertheless for the insistence with which it is made. These new Madonna records unfortunately still sound like literally nothing, pure vacuum cleaner noise through the ears, so goes the decade, so perhaps it’s a good thing that you can barely hear Ms. Carpenter.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Per Dave Moore’s bestiary of weak pop melodies, here’s a melody that’s weak in almost three of those ways; it’s like we’re listening to the alto harmony of some unproffered real melody. “Me Against the Music” had that problem too, but at least it was kinetic.
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Nortey Dowuona: “Aunt Sabrina is happy, but she doesn’t smile.”
“Well, when I met Madonna, she was on, smiling all the time, and the older I got, I never wanted to smile unless I wanted to, Bailey. One thing your mother didn’t tell you is that all the times you look around and see pictures of me smiling, it was because as a child, I was looking at Madonna and she smiled, all the time. And I thought, that’s perfect. If I’m achieving all my dreams, I’d smile very big, very wide all day. So I did, for so long, even as my career began to slide down. I did everything you can think of — acting, collabs with new artists, risque photoshoots, the works. And none of it stopped the spotlight shifting off my face. So, one day, I took a pic with a fan and her aunt, and I just didn’t smile. There was a big furor, but you know what? I felt the freest I’d been in years. So yes, I’m happy. I have classic songs, wonderful film and TV roles, and my big, beautiful house, and I get to be your aunt. I do smile, but only when no one can see me, but everywhere else I never smile. I’m not Madonna, nor did I need to be. I’m Aunt Sabrina, and that’s all any one needs to know about me.”
“That’s really wise, Aunt Sabrina.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you play the Madonna song with you again?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yay!”
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Charli Jae Brister: Smooth atmospheric house groove? Decent melody? Done before it gets too exhausting? Too restrained in its vocal performance? Okay!
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