For a year that has featured a mind-boggling number of major album releases, from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé to Billie Eilish to Ariana Grande, pop music in 2024 has, surprisingly enough, been more clearly defined by smaller artists rising to meet their respective moments. We’ve seen it play out with Charli xcx over the course of Brat Summer, Chappell Roan as her audiences have ballooned to watch her seize festival stages, and Tinashe while “match my freak” has become common parlance.
And now, after Sabrina Carpenter joined pop’s A-list thanks to the back-to-back explosions of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” new album Short n’ Sweet is a moment that’s perfectly timed, highly anticipated, and entrusted with lofty expectations.
Plenty of signs existed that Carpenter, a Disney Channel veteran who released four studio albums on Disney-owned Hollywood Records, was a special talent prior to “Espresso” becoming her first top 10 hit in April. Her 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send demonstrated a natural understanding of pop songwriting and vocal nuance, and was one of that year’s strongest pop projects. Yet Short n’ Sweet comfortably surpasses its predecessor by simultaneously expanding Carpenter’s sound and drilling down on the qualities that make her such a singular top 40 talent.
Carpenter tosses out shimmery hooks that stick in your brain and cheeky phrases that you’ll want to share with your friends — get ready for “bed chem” and “Juno” to turn into slang — but as her sexuality has become a bigger part of her musical identity, her romantic subjects have also become more fleshed-out, and her self-examinations more poignant. Meanwhile, the bubblegum riffs on Emails have deepened into explorations of country, rock, folk and R&B in ways that speak to an inherent curiosity yet never stray too far away from what Carpenter does best.
She has more radio-ready darts to throw, with the dazzling “Taste” appearing to be next up — but the finger-picked woe of “Slim Pickins” and the rhythmic bounce of “Good Graces” push Carpenter into bold new territory, and make for a more comprehensive full-length. Working with studio vets like Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, Julia Michaels and Julian Bunetta, Carpenter has assembled a team of confidantes that know how to navigate an unfamiliar shade and maximize a refrain — and at 12 songs, Short n’ Sweet breezes by, a well-oiled machine without a uneven track in the bunch.
We shall see how many more hits Carpenter scores off of Short n’ Sweet, after already collecting two off of its track list. Regardless of which songs go viral or cross over to radio, though, the singer has unveiled one of the most accomplished pop albums of the year, making good on years of potential with a definitive statement. Consider the moment met.
We’re still digging into the Short n’ Sweet track list, but here is a breakdown and preliminary ranking of all 12 songs on Sabrina Carpenter’s latest:
Carpenter fills this jaunty little lament over the status of modern men with witticisms you’ll need a few listens to fully catch — in the second verse, for instance, she very quickly writes off a guy for not knowing the difference between “there,” “their” and “they are,” heartbreak caused by a homophone. The album’s closest brush with country-pop, “Slim Pickins” is not positioned as a centerpiece on Short n’ Sweet but charms nonetheless.
Capping off the album with a bitter slow jam that flips the idiom “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” on its head, “Don’t Smile” finds Carpenter mumbling “I want you to miss me” and asking one of her friends to help her lose her ex’s number. Sounding dumbfounded by a loss instead of ready to accept more wins, Carpenter shows off a different side of her psyche on “Don’t Smile,” helping to round out the album thematically before it concludes.
Near the end of an album that largely focuses on personal pains and pleasures, Carpenter zooms out to examine how women treat themselves in modern relationships — predisposed by society to foist blame upon themselves when they deserve none, or refuse to face reality when it is staring them in the face. “Lie To Girls” is startling in the best way, and the unassuming production lets Carpenter’s voice echo and her words to resonate.
For this thinly veiled threat against potential heartbreak, Carpenter promises that, if her dude does her dirty, she’ll “tell the world you finish your chores prematurely,” and also move on to dating his favorite athlete. “Good Graces” coats that post-breakup coldness in the buttery sounds of ‘90s R&B, with Carpenter channeling the rhythmic pop style that artists like Mariah Carey and TLC handled so masterfully and putting her tongue-in-cheek spin on its warm textures.
The heart of “Sharpest Tool,” a racing reminiscence of a failed romance, is the juxtaposition between Carpenter’s blurted-out verses scavenging the details of her heartbreak and the downcast conclusion of the chorus, “We never talk about it.” Antonoff’s fingerprints are all over this one — the picked guitar strings leading to the syncopated beat recalls some of the best moments of The 1975’s pop opus Being Funny in a Foreign Language — but Carpenter amplifies the sorrowful corners with unmasked anger and hurt, and elevates the arrangement as a whole.
An evisceration of a bro who’s into Leonard Cohen lyrics, mushrooms, meditation and refusing to grow up, “Dumb & Poetic” allows Carpenter to seethe, dressing down a pretender in a little over two minutes without hiding her frustration over his pathetic state. “Dumb & Poetic” simmers in a country-coded refrain — “Don’t think you understand / Just ’cause you talk like one doesn’t make you a man,” she sings over unadorned guitar — but excels most when the lyrical details really sting, as if her subject’s characteristics disgust her beyond comprehension.
Marvel at the degree of difficulty with which Carpenter sings the evolving chorus of “Coincidence,” her upper register gripping the words “And you’ve lost all your common sense / What a coincidence,” and rolling the syllables around in her mouth to try and understand her betrayed circumstances. “Coincidence” enters campfire sing-along territory thanks to its “na-na-na” post-chorus and brash guitar strums, but Carpenter imbues the snappy production with lasting feeling.
“Please Please Please” was Carpenter’s first No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart, the “Espresso” follow-up to continue her upward trajectory, and a music video meeting with her romantic partner Barry Keoghan — but ultimately, its legacy (and function on Short n’ Sweet) will likely consist of its cross-genre approach, as the sonic boundaries that the song erases hinted at an album that similarly hopscotches across styles. At face value, of course, “Please Please Please” remains a top-notch sing-along, especially when you and your friends are in a setting that allows you to belt out the “motherf–ker” line as loudly as possible.
Embrace the full Sabrina Carpenter Experience with “Bed Chem,” a dreamy flirtation full of pinpoint vocals, personal touches, sexual innuendos and melodies strong enough to be main hooks that then lead into even better melodies. As a phrase, “Bed Chem” is about to enter the cultural lexicon faster than you can say “me espresso”; as a showcase for what Carpenter does best, the song is both sensual, earnest and unafraid to make you laugh. Regardless of how “Bed Chem” performs on the charts, clock this one as a no-doubt fan favorite.
Following the smashes “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” album opener “Taste” has seemingly been positioned as Carpenter’s next focus track, complete with a Jenna Ortega-starring music video — and the song, a sexually charged and deliriously likable potpourri of pop styles, more than earns the spotlight. Carpenter fuses rock guitar, country-tinged vocals and disco melodies into a killer heads-up toward the other woman in a love triangle (“You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you,” she shrugs); “Taste” leaps out as an electrifying anthem and Carpenter treats it as such, complete with a handclaps-and-drums breakdown designed for the arena crowds she’s about to command.
The spark that lit the fuse for Carpenter’s huge year, “Espresso” sounds just as instantaneous and effervescent as it did multiple months and billions of streams ago — the mark of a pop smash that’s going to persist as a cultural touchstone. In the context of Short n’ Sweet, “Espresso” offers a jolt to kick off the album’s second half and keep the momentum high following “Bed Chem,” but the single continues to stand alone as a remarkable flash point in Carpenter’s overall catalog, and the type of breakthrough hit that’s even better than the hype suggests it is.
Carpenter doesn’t sing “You make me wanna fall in love” on the ‘80s-indebted workout “Juno”; she sings, “You make me wanna make you fall in love,” a mastermind-in-training post-Eras tour who’s considering letting her beau “make me Juno,” and engaging in sex so transcendent it results in a baby. The standout lines on “Juno” are primed for TikTok trends and quote-tweets, but once again, Carpenter enthralls in the details of her double entendres, like the way she breathlessly rhymes “high-fived” with “objectified,” or how the bridge builds and builds toward that one indelible declaration. “Juno” is the work of a pop pro, and Carpenter makes it sound effortless.
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