Sabrina Carpenter Seals Arrival As Pop Superstar With 'Short n' Sweet'

There never was a pop-girl summer something like 2024—always—and Sabrina Carpenter is one of the crucial reasons. With 'Espresso' and 'Please Please Please', she can claim two top contenders for Song of the Summer. But she closes her amazing rise with Short n' Sweet, her crowning full-length, showcasing her ability to transform romantic roadkill into impossibly brilliant pop. Sabrina's nuptials aren't just on vacation—they're in a coma. These songs are usually dirty, always funny, often bad, but she gets baked along with everyone else. As he admits, “I can make a shitshow seem like forever.”

The 25-year-old former Disney child star has spent years honing her skills—Short n' Sweet is her sixth album, based on the discovery of 2022 Email I can't send. But like the other world-famous queens of summer — Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Tinashe — she's a crafty veteran who grabs inspiration just because she wants it. (She's one of the only singers who can boast of shadowing a Number One hit and then scoring one of her own.) She knew the world was watching her this time, and Short n' Sweet sealing her arrival as a pop superstar.

“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” are two of the highlights, but they aren't even the best songs on here. That honor goes to future karaoke classic “Lie to Girls,” with Carpenter wailing over acoustic guitar, “You don't have to lie to girls/If they like you, they'll just lie to themselves.” She laments the romantic delusions of her mother, her friends, and even “the girl outside the strip who reads her tarot cards.” (The funniest tarot burn since Joni Mitchell went to Bleecker Street Hejira to see the eighteen bucks go up in smoke.) But as he sings, “We like to read the hard facts and swear they're wrong / We like to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest.”

Sabrina may belt out rhyming couplets like a twisted godmother of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Pope, but her sensibility is her own. He's obsessed with “Bed Chem” and why it fails to solve the problems men face, from infidelity to bad grammar. (Some dude doesn't know the difference between “there,” “them,” and “them”—a red flag for sure.) He laments the fact that he's stuck with straight guys, “since the good guys call them ex-losers/And since the Lord forget my gay awakening.”

Short n' Sweet it's impressively focused—12 songs in 36 minutes, no features, no guests, no mistakes. He co-wrote each with Amy Allen, who had her own summer hit in “Girl with a Problem.” Its producers include John Ryan, Ian Kirkpatrick and Justin Bunetta. Jack Antonoff did four of the highlights, including “Please Please Please” and “Lie to Girls.”

There's more banjo and acoustic guitar here than you'd guess, mostly used for its percussive snapshot, like the finger-picking rhythmic hooks of “Slim Pickins” and “Sharpest Tool.” The whole country/synth-pop vibe is reminiscent of Madonna's disco-cowgirl phase. Music era—somehow Ms. Ciccone's “Don't Tell Me” has become an important pop rock for our moment.

“Taste” is a delightfully vicious opener, as she tells her ex's new girlfriend, “You'll just have to taste me when she kisses you.” But the flip side is “Coincidence,” where the ex is back in the game, as she sings, “Last week you had no doubt/This week you're keeping room for her tongue in your mouth.” On the eighties-style synth woofer 'Bed Chem', she celebrates shameless lust to the point of becoming downright Shakespearean, in her ability to rhyme 'Come right on me, I mean camaraderie' with 'Where are you? Why shouldn't he hit me?'

Sabrina rips so many boys into so many things here, but one of her funniest targets is the literary pose in “Dumb & Poetic.” She quips, “Try to come off like you're smooth and well-spoken/Jack in Leonard Cohen lyrics.” The late Montreal poet-sage would have been fully honored by this tribute, as he would have enjoyed Boygenius's equally hard-hitting “Leonard Cohen” last year. Cohen loved to poke fun at male vanity (including his own) as these songwriters do, and would appreciate how Sabrina turns her romantic woes into barbs like “Save all your breath for your floor meditation” and “I promise the mushrooms don't they change your life.” Also, both have a knack for weird rhymes—somewhere, Cohen is probably kicking himself for not interspersing “Hallelujah” with “dream-come-true ya” and “Mountain Dew ya.”

“Don't Smile” is the only bummer, with a comically silly message – “don't smile because it happened, baby, cry because it's over” – but very heavy on the execution. Carpenter just has more fun singing about hate than frustrated defeat. One of her idols, Kacey Musgraves, recently came on stage to do a duet on Nancy Sinatra's classic “These Boots Are Made for Walkin',” and it felt like a passing of the torch, because that's the spirit Sabrina is aiming for here. . On its vinyl release Short and sweet, Carpenter signs off with “Needless to Say,” where she pokes fun at her own “fun crisis in her early 20s.” But if it led to such great songs, no one will judge her at all.