Sabrina Carpenter cements her pop queen status with ‘Short n’ Sweet’

Sabrina Carpenter knows how to write a pop hit. She’s proven it this summer — twice, in fact — with the chart-shattering singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” which were so successful around the globe that the “Espresso” music video made it all the way to the birthplace of espresso, aka to the TV at a random pizza place I frequented in Rome this June. 

Whether her sixth studio album, “Short n’ Sweet,” would meet the uber-viral standard of those first two tracks seemed to be the unspoken question on the internet’s lips. Now that it’s out, it seems the answer is “yes.”

It’s certainly satisfied TikTok. The album opener, “Taste,” has already graced the background of 1.7 million videos on the app, somehow topping the 1.5 million of the Jack Antonoff signature synth, ubiquitous-to-the-point-of-absurdity “Please Please Please.” 

None of the new tracks are as hypnotic and earworm-inducing as the lead singles — fun fact, I wrote my metaphysics final paper last April by playing “Espresso” on loop to numb my mind — but Carpenter’s vocals shine as always in fun, compulsively listenable melodies.

Carpenter told V Magazine her last album, “Emails I Can’t Send,” “felt like a first album for me in a lot of ways.” It featured some upbeat hits, most notably “Feather,” as well as stripped-back ballads with deeply personal lyrics. The album touched on heartbreak and alluded to painful family history as well as Carpenter’s highly scrutinized relationship with Olivia Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett. 

The former Disney Channel star’s songwriting on “Short n’ Sweet,” though frequently exploring heartbreak, feels significantly less personal than “Emails.” After pouring her heart out in song in 2022, Carpenter has wrapped herself in a shield of irony. 

It seems she learned from the enormous popularity of the dirty rhyming outros she wrote for every single tour location for the viral closer “Nonsense.” Over-the-top humor that you’ll groan at, but also be inevitably impressed by, is the recipe for success Carpenter took from that era and ran with in her latest album. She’s a master of making fun of the 21st century’s absurdity. Just take a throwaway line in “Coincidence,” in which she sings, “You’re holding space for her tongue in your mouth.”

“Bed Chem” has perhaps the best lineup of wry humor from the album. “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie,” she sings sweetly. Shortly following that choice wordplay is a turn of phrase so out of place as to make the whole song — “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” It’s silly, and that’s the point. While “Short n’ Sweet” might not be groundbreaking sonically, Carpenter excels at her specialty of sarcastic quips.

It’s a brief album, almost giving the impression that Carpenter and her team were in a hurry to capitalize on the artist’s viral summer with a full album after a year of touring “Emails I Can’t Send.” Fortunately, this doesn’t show in the songs themselves so much as in the eponymous 36-minute run time. Instead, it’s a tight album with twelve solid, distinct tracks. The album dips somewhat at “Good Graces,” which is a perfectly fine but somewhat bland track that, for me, sounds like it could’ve fallen from anywhere in the amorphous pop stratosphere. 

“Sharpest Tool” is a calmer moment on an otherwise energetic album, with a pre-chorus strongly reminiscent of Bruno Mars’ classic “Marry You.” Dreamy reverb plays very nicely with Carpenter’s velvety voices, as the lo-fi, bedroom pop sultriness of “Don’t Smile” shows off. 

There are only so many ways to string together finite notes, but “Short n’ Sweet” recalls other music more often that would be pure coincidence. Dolly Parton is a clear inspiration for “Sharpest Tool” and even more so in “Slim Pickins,” a breathy, satisfyingly layered song mourning the apparently barren dating landscape for straight women. Much of the album’s production has a ‘70s feel, an era that even appears in songs with more of a 2024 sound.
“Coincidence,” for instance, immediately brought to mind the opening bars of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” 

Ever surrounded by tabloid whispers, Carpenter has the rumor mill already churning out a theory that some of the tracks refer to a messy love triangle involving Camilla Cabello and Shawn Mendes. I’m in favor of cooling it as a society on the scouring-lyrics-for-hints-about-men front. Let’s redirect that energy toward fact-checking the news. If we’ve learned anything from how much vitriol Carpenter received during the “Drivers License” era, it’s that reaching into celebrities’ personal lives hurts real people and brings out the worst in everyone.

Instead, enjoy the album the way the cover seems to demand — while soaked in sun, with a kiss from a mysterious lover on your shoulder and an inside joke behind your baby blues.