Music

Earlier this year, Sabrina Carpenter partnered with SKIMS for a sultry campaign that many fans — including the singer’s boyfriend, Barry Keoghan — went wild for. Others, however, weren’t so happy with her choice to partner with a brand founded by Kim Kardashian, given the reality star’s famous feud with Taylor Swift.

But in a new interview with Rolling Stone published Monday (June 17), Carpenter gave assurances that the superstar — with whom she became close while opening for Swift’s Eras Tour in the spring — was totally fine with the arrangement. “As much as people want to believe you’re tuned into every little thing, I’m not because I’m constantly working,” the “Espresso” singer said.

“In that scenario, I’ve been very, very communicative with her about that situation, and I just love her so much and support her till the end,” she continued. “So it was no weirdness for me, but I know people will just say things because that’s all they have time to do.”

Carpenter also made sure to sing Swift’s praises in the interview. “I could never compare my life, my career, my trajectory to anything close to what she’s done,” Carpenter noted.

“She always puts out music at a time where I didn’t realize I needed those songs,” she added of The Tortured Poets Department. “We’re very, very verbal with each other about our mutual love and admiration. … She played me ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ before it came out, and that’s also one of my favorites.”

Though it seems Swift gave her blessing to Carpenter’s SKIMS campaign, the “Anti-Hero” singer has been very clear about where she personally stands with Kardashian. In her December TIME Person of the Year interview, she even called out the shapewear mogul by name, noting that 2016’s “Famous” debacle with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) “took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.”

“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she added at the time.

In April, Swift also appeared to call out Kardashian again by capitalizing the letters K, I and M in the title of her The Tortured Poets Department track “thanK you aIMee.” On the song, the 14-time Grammy winner compares her subject to a high-school bully and sings, “I can’t forgive the way you made me feel … But I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”

After months of teasing, Katy Perry officially kicked off the countdown to KP6 on Monday (June 17) with the announcement that the first single from her upcoming sixth album, “Woman’s World,” will drop on July 11. The news was heralded with a brief snippet of the empowering pop song as well as the single’s eye-popping art, shot by British photographer Jack Bridgland.

The photo features Perry dressed in a skimpy white bikini, her legs encased in what look like metallic pegasus legs and her arms tucked into her voluminous black hair. “Woman’s World” is slated to drop at 7 p.m. ET on July 11, with the official music video to debut the next day.

Perry uploaded a 15-second preview of the song on Monday morning as well, in which she poses and flips her hair while wearing the outfit from the single cover accented by a chunky necklace while singing, “Sexy, confident, so intelligent/ She is heaven-sent, so soft, so strong,” over a bubbling electro pop beat.

At press time, no additional information was available on the title of Perry’s sixth full-length studio album, the follow-up to 2020’s Smile. Perry began ramping up excitement for her next era last month when, after finishing her seven-year run on American Idol, she changed her social media profile pic to a sleek, futuristic silver logo with her shiny initials floating inside a pair of parentheses.

In April Perry told Access Hollywood that her next album was going to be one of her happiest LPs to date. “I just have yet to make a record from a place of feeling really happy and whole and full of love,” she said at the time. “Sometimes artists are like, ‘Oh, that’s boring, you want to make music from kind of like a tougher place,’ but actually it’s very bright and joyful, like pure joy and fun and playful and celebratory and a party.”

Last August during a show on her Las Vegas residency, Perry told the crowd, “If you can’t love me at my Witness and Smile era, then you can’t love me in my KP6 era.” Technically, the upcoming album is the singer’s seventh, though she did release her debut LP, Katy Hudson, in 2001 under her birth name, which had a more Christian rock-themed vibe than her subsequent major label albums.

Check out the “Woman’s World” preview below.