Sabrina Carpenter, Short n’ Sweet
If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this year, you’ll have heard Sabrina Carpenter’s sweet, fizzy pop. Upon its release in April, her disco-inflected track Espresso became an instant Gen Z classic, with its deeply silly catchphrase: getting so into a lover’s head that she keeps him up at night, Carpenter sings, “that’s that me espresso”. The follow-up single, the woozy, ABBA-esque Please Please Please, similarly became the song that launched a thousand reels with its desperate request to a new boyfriend: don’t embarrass me!
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ’n Sweet: is sixth time the charm?
In what seems like a short time, Carpenter has catapulted to the top of the pops; it doesn’t hurt that she supported Taylor Swift on the Australian leg of the record-smashing Eras Tour. With such strong lead singles, the 25-year-old’s sixth studio album was always going to have a lot riding on it; even though she’s been in the game for over a decade, beginning as a Disney Channel actor, this is the first time she’s truly been on the world stage.
Alongside contemporaries such as Chappell Roan, Carpenter is part of an emerging class of unashamedly sex-forward pop stars. Despite her wholesome family TV roots, Carpenter makes no secret of her horniness on this record. She’s upfront – her live performances of 2022 single Nonsense proved it, with outros so laced with explicit innuendo that she once got banned from the BBC because of it.
That attitude is front and centre on Short n’ Sweet. Punchy opening track and third single Taste teases an ex’s new girlfriend with Carpenter’s lingering memory; in Juno, riffing on the Elliot Page film of the same name, the singer is so physically intoxicated by her new beau that she begins to fantasise about pregnancy. “Where art thou, why not uponeth me?” Carpenter speak-sings on Bed Chem, with echoes of Tina Weymouth on Tom Tom Club’s 1981 new-wave classic Genius of Love.
The 25-year-old has had a year for the ages with breakout hits Espresso and Please Please Please.
These are cheeky, self-aware songs – almost every one of them has a memorable one-liner, usually either fawning over or deriding a male object of desire or revulsion (on the acoustic Dumb and Poetic, Carpenter mocks a pseudo-intellectual softboi type who likes to “jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen”).
The subject matter does start to wear thin across the record, and Carpenter’s humour is laser-focused on her target audience and feels tailor-made for memes. Anyone who’s not terminally online might be left scratching their heads.
Musically, Carpenter has two modes: upbeat radio pop and softer folk-inspired songs, like the fingerpicked Slim Pickins. Unsurprisingly, Carpenter worked with pop’s It producer Jack Antonoff on four songs on the record, and his dreamy fingerprints are all over it.
There’s a feeling of pastiche, with many of the album’s tracks easily pinned to other artists: Taste’s DNA is firmly Fleetwood Mac and Divinyls, with shades of Seven Wonders and I Touch Myself in its instrumentals and melodies. The pop-R&B of Good Graces is all Ariana Grande, as is Carpenter’s small squeal at the end of a chorus in Juno. Roan’s Casual is the precursor to the Gracie Abrams-sounding Sharpest Tool, in which Carpenter contemplates an allegedly no-strings attachment that’s starting to feel like a lot more than that.
She’s a lot of flirty, frothy fun, but Carpenter feels like the sum of the internet’s parts. Still, Short n’ Sweet does what it says on the tin, delivering a half-hour sugar rush that is very much of this moment. Whether it will stand the test of time is another question – artefacts of the zeitgeist run the risk of ageing poorly – but for now, is it that sweet? I guess so.
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