Sabrina Carpenter has been releasing music for nearly a decade, and while Short n’ Sweet is her sixth album overall, she regards it as her sophomore LP, calling it her second “big girl” project in an interview with Variety.

"For the people who love those early records and listen to them, I love you for that. But I personally feel a sense of separation from them, largely due to the shift in who I am as a person and as an artist, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic,” she said of this new phase in her career. “It’s my second ‘big girl’ album; it’s a companion but it’s not the same. When it comes to having full creative control and being a full-fledged adult, I would consider this a sophomore album.”

With the help of Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Jack Antonoff, Carpenter demonstrates that she’s a pop singer capable of shining against a wide variety of sonic backdrops. And while many lyrics come straight from Carpenter’s heart, she admitted that fans seem to connect more with the other, more lighthearted tracks where her everyday self is more apparent.

“The songs that really resonated with people were closest to my truest personality—in its silliest, most fun form or its most raw and vulnerable,” she told Vanity Fair. “That gave me all the confidence to tap into myself a lot deeper.”

“I don’t think of myself as a perpetually sad person, and my last album was dealing with a specific, solidified heartbreak,” she added. “For the most part, I feel very much myself again, even in the moments where I’m nervous about the future. There’s a lot more uncertainty, which is fun to write because there’s a lot of what-ifs in that. I am keeping my eyes really open.”

Carpenter kicks off her Short n’ Sweet Tour across North America this fall and wraps up with a European leg next spring.

‘Short n’ Sweet’ is Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth album – but it’s her spiritual sophomore, since 2022’s ’emails i can’t send’ catapulted her into the mainstream via a spiky love triangle that ultimately inspired the songs that launched both Carpenter’s rise and Olivia Rodrigo’s. ‘Espresso’, though, was the caffeine hit that led this album launch, the most distinctive song of the summer of recent years, and a manifestation statement from Carpenter. It’s true, everyone has basically been thinking about her every day since it came out. One might expect, then, more of the same from ‘Short n’ Sweet’: sultry, retro-tinged pop bops that assert Carpenter’s place as pop star, irresistible icon, reigning supreme over charts and admirers with infinite confidence. But no – ‘Short n’ Sweet’ veers towards the softer, more sincere side. 

If you wanted to take a swing at putting together a timeline of ‘Short n’ Sweet’s songwriting, try and sort its tracklisting into categories and stages, you’d have to guess that ‘Espresso’ and its strutting allure sat either at the very beginning, or at the end. The rest of the record is less double-shot swagger and more fluttering, hearts-racing caffeine anxiety as Sabrina taps into more of the vulnerability that characterised eics. ‘Good Graces’ is a guard-up groove in which Carpenter describes how quickly she can ‘turn lovin’ into hatred’ if she’s wronged by a suitor – but her delicate delivery over an R&B-esque beat feels less assertive, more almost panicked and protective, ready to run away at the first sign of danger. ‘Slim Pickins’ and ‘Sharpest Tool’ continue the trend, a return-to-form for Sabrina with a gentle acoustic guitar on each, over which her lyrics lament the various ways in which men can be disappointing – indeed, on ‘Slim Pickins’, Carpenter just gives up: “guess I’ll end this life alone / I am not dramatic…”

It’s fun listening despite its romantic nihilism, thanks to Carpenter’s deadpan lyricism – as we know from the “I beg you don’t embarrass me, motherfucker”s and the “that’s that me espresso”s we’ve heard so far, Carpenter is writing straight from the heart: no pretentiousness, no lofty aspirations, just precisely the silly, emotional, passionate thoughts that run through the head of a 25 year old woman in a situationship. As she says in ‘Dumb & Poetic’, she has no time for “highbrow manipulation”.. especially when she has sentiments she just needs to get out like ‘Juno’s “I’m so fuckin’ horny” in which Carpenter eloquently explains how she fancies someone so much she “might let you make me Juno”, on one of the record’s bigger bops too, going full coming-of-age with sparkly guitar riffs and grooves. 

Carpenter mostly sticks to the blueprint – soft acoustic instrumentation for the more introspective outpourings, sexier soundtracking when she’s feeling sexier. ‘Espresso’ is joined in the latter category by ‘Juno’, and ‘Bed Chem’ which is a disco cut laden with barely-concealed innuendo, as well as opener ‘Taste’, in which Carpenter addresses the ex someone’s run back to. These silly, saucy moments work well because they feel so convincing set against the backdrop of the rest of the emotional undercurrents she doesn’t flinch away from. ‘Short n’ Sweet’ as a whole is a little less addictive than its lead single, and a little less sensitive than its predecessor, but it’s a solid entry into the Sabrina canon, with plenty of potential to sneak up on you with a gut-punch should you ever find yourself relating to it. 

Sabrina Carpenter: Short n’ Sweet is a Flirty Pop Masterpiece

It’s been a breakout year for hit-making singer Sabrina Carpenter. The former Disney Channel star soundtracked this summer with her smash singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” reaching new heights after the success of her 2022 breakout album Emails I Can’t Send. Her long-awaited album Short n’ Sweet, out now, marks the next step in her fast-moving career.

Fun and flirty, with a frothy hook and bitter little kick, Sabrina Carpenter’s single “Espresso” was widely hailed as the Song of the Summer. Its follow-up “Please, Please, Please” delivered an equally bittersweet umami, as the 25-year-old Disney graduate slipped from her sugariest tone to a menacing growl, warning her liability of an actor-boyfriend: “Don’t embarrass me, mf”.

Given the astounding commercial success of its two lead singles, this record has a lot riding on it. I’m happy to report that those punchy little song-shots aren’t the only cool moments on an album that confidently hair-flips its way between TikTok pop, yacht rock, country and R&B without breaking stride or losing identity.

The aptly named record – Carpenter is shy of 5ft tall and the track-list is only 12 songs-long – is actually the singer’s sixth album. She was just 10 years old when she began posting videos of herself online covering tracks by Adele and Taylor Swift (whom she opened for earlier this year) and only 15 when she released her debut EP, Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying, while also starring in the Disney TV series Girl Meets World. There followed a range of teen bop and some experimental ukulele jams before Carpenter left Disney’s Hollywood Record for Island, on which she released her first “grown up” album Emails I Can’t Send in 2022.

That album saw Carpenter make sharp, fizzy lemonade from the lemons of a tabloid kerfuffle around her personal life involving fellow Disney alum Olivia Rodrigo. It was rumoured that the “blonde girl” referred to on Rodrigo’s 2022 smash hit “Driver’s License” was Carpenter, for whom Rodrigo’s boyfriend allegedly left her. Carpenter played slickly into the drama with her own 2022 single “Because I Liked a Boy” on which she called out the slut-shaming by fans and the media: “Now, I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut/ I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.” In the music video, she winked wittily into the scarlet woman image, scorching in a cherry red dress.

Short n’ Sweet finds Carpenter pressing harder into that man-eating sizzle with lyrics in which she apologises for showing her lover’s private photos to friends (“Juno”) and pouts “Come right on me… where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” on “Bad Chem”. The singer is believed to be dating Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, though rumours of a break-up are floating about and gossip fans are bound to be looking for clues into her relationship with the hard partying thesp – a tendency she’ssomewhat encouraged by casting him as a gangster opposite her in the video for “Please, Please, Please”.

The album opens with its best song “Taste”: a terrifically glossy slice of FM rock on which Carpenter cautions an ex-paramour’s new girlfriend that every time she kisses him, she’ll also be tasting her. Low-slung electric guitar chords slice through the melody with the casual efficiency of a state of the art, fibreglass rudder. The track dials up the sultry pout without losing the sense of heartbreak in the undertow. Triumphantly nonchalant, Carpenter sounds like she’s singing the blunt lines with her sunglasses on, as Eighties drum pad effects catch the light like sun on a calm sea. It’s the lack of friction that creates exhilaration and melancholy.

First mined at the beginning of the decade by the likes of Florence + The Machine and Maggie Rogers, this kind of late Seventies, early Eighties yacht rock is having a moment. Carpenter also plucks the strings of the current country revival with the snappy “Slim Pickings” on which she scrolls through “all the douchebags on my phone” to the skippy finger-pickin’ of a yee-haw guitar.

Though the Nineties R&B of “Good Graces” is a little forgettable, the savvy snark she puts into ballads like “Dumb and Poetic” and “Lie to Girls” are wincingly memorable. Although their fans originally divided into two camps, Carpenter and Rodrigo share a similarly unapologetic style. Rodrigo stans would find much to love in all the sour sucker-punching here if they can get past the alleged feud between the two stars.

Short n’ Sweet ends with the unexpectedly Laurel Canyon-y strum-along of “Coincidence”. Imagine a 21st century version of Crosby Stills Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell singing along around a beach fire and you’re there. The whole thing is delightfully caffeinated: Short n’ Sweet is full of hiss and steam, grinding gears and deep kicks beneath the shining chrome surfaces.

Sabrina Carpenter: Short n’ Sweet, a Pop Masterpiece

On her sixth album release but still only 25? The former Disney teen star Sabrina Carpenter has played the long game beautifully. After a slew of forgettable early albums, the American is suddenly the hottest property in the pop world via a confluence of clever marketing – a high-profile romance with the Irish actor Barry Keoghan didn’t harm matters; nor did a support slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour – and as evidenced by both the demand and the eyebrow-raising prices for next year’s world tour.

Carpenter’s USP of being “the saucy vamp with the witty lyrics” has already set her apart from the proliferation of women singers dominating the pop world. Short n’ Sweet has already spawned two huge hits in Espresso and Please Please Please (reportedly written about her romance with Keoghan), but as it happens there is plenty of personality packed into the other songs on the album, too. “I thought if something was funny enough to make me laugh then maybe it belonged in a song,” she has said of her process. “Happy or sad.”

Humour largely outweighs heartache here. Sharpest Tool is an eye-rolling takedown of a clueless lover (“I know you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed / We had sex, I met your best friends / Then a bird flies by and you forget”), while the enjoyable country-pop pastiche of Slim Pickins sees her croon “This boy doesn’t know even the difference between there, they’re and they are / And he’s naked in my room, listing all the things he’s missing.”

The provocative glam-pop of Taste plays up Carpenter’s lascivious reputation; Bed Chem sees her playfully fantasise about her sexual connection with “the cute boy with the white jacket and the thick accent”. Dumb & Poetic and Confidence, meanwhile, are caustic rebukes delivered to a former lover.

This is not an experimental, challenging or risk-taking record. Carpenter is clearly happy to leave that to some of her other peers. It is, however, a breezy and often very enjoyable collection of songs that treads a thin line between frivolous and throwaway – which many would argue is precisely what a pop album should do.

Short n' Sweet: An Album Review

The record showcases the singer’s clever and honest songwriting, infused with cheekiness and self-deprecating humor, making it both relatable and feel-good.

The record showcases the singer’s clever and honest songwriting, infused with cheekiness and self-deprecating humor, making it both relatable and feel-good.