There was never It’s a pop summer that looks a lot like 2024, and Sabrina Carpenter is one of the big reasons why. “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” can claim to be two of the best songs of the summer. But it’s “Please Please” that caps her meteoric rise. Short and sweetIt's her full-length album that showcases her talent for turning murdered animals into beautiful pop music. Sabrina isn't just on trips, she's in a coma. The songs are usually raunchy, always funny, and often mischievous, yet she's making fun of herself along with everyone. As she admits, “I can make a funny show seem like it's going on forever.”
The 25-year-old former Disney star has spent years honing her skills –Short and sweet It is her sixth album, which builds on her huge success in 2022. Emails I can't sendBut like the other queens of the summer—Chappelle Rowan, Charli XCX, Tinashe—she’s a consummate veteran who taps into an innocent energy, just because she wants to. (She’s one of the few singers who can boast that she was wronged on a hit song and then went on to record her own.) She knew the world was watching this time, and she was listening. Short and sweet She seals her arrival as a pop star.
“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” are highlights, but they’re not even the best tunes here. That honor goes to the future karaoke classic “Lie to Girls,” in which Carpenter laments over acoustic guitar, “You don’t have to lie to girls/If they love you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” She laments the romantic self-delusions of her mother, her friends, and even “the girl outside the strip club who reads her tarot cards.” (The funniest tarot burn since Joni Mitchell went to Bleecker Street in 1991.) Migration (To watch eighteen dollars evaporate into thin air.) But as she sings, “We love to read hard, hard facts and swear they're not true / We love to mistake butterflies for a heart attack.”
Sabrina may rhyme like the godmother of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Pope, but her sensibilities are her own. She’s obsessed with Bed Chem, and why it fails to solve the problems that men have, from infidelity to bad grammar. (No man knows the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re”—a sure warning sign.) She laments the fact that she’s stuck with straight men, “because good men call their exes lost/And God forgot my gay awakening.”
Short and sweet This is an impressively focused 12-track 36-minute album with no interludes, no guest appearances, no mistakes. She co-wrote every song with Amy Allen, who had a summer hit with “Problem Girl.” Its producers include John Ryan, Ian Kirkpatrick and Justin Bunetta. Jack Antonoff also performs on four of the album’s highlights, including “Please Please Please” and “Lie to the Girls.”
There's more banjo and acoustic guitar here than anyone would have imagined, and it's mostly used for its percussive rhythms, as in the finger-tapping rhythms of “Slim Pickins” and “Sharpest Tool.” The whole country/synthpop vibe evokes Madonna's disco-cowboy phase in her songs. music Somehow, Ms. Sicconi's “Don't Tell Me” has become a cornerstone of pop music in our time.
“Taste” is a fierce, delicious opener, where she tells her ex’s new girlfriend, “You just gotta taste me when he kisses you.” But the flip side is “Coincidence,” where the ex gets back in the game, singing, “Last week you had no doubts / This week you’re keeping room for her tongue in your mouth.” On the ’80s-style “Bed Chem,” she celebrates shameless lust to the point of becoming downright Shakespearean, in her ability to rhyme “Come on me, I mean company” with “Where are you? Why don’t you come on me?”
Sabrina has torn a lot of boys to shreds here, but one of her most entertaining targets is the literary pretender on “Dumb & Poetic.” She quips, “Try to sound like you’re soft and well-spoken/Enjoy Leonard Cohen’s lyrics.” The late Montreal poet laureate would have been completely honored by this tribute, just as he enjoyed Boygenius’ equally brutal “Leonard Cohen” last year. Cohen loved to poke fun at male egos (including his own) the way these authors do, and he would have appreciated how Sabrina turned her romantic travails into quips like “Hold all your breath to meditate on the earth” and “I promise you mushrooms won’t change your life.” They also both have a knack for weird rhymes—somewhere, Cohen is probably kicking himself for not extending “Hallelujah” to “dream-come-true ya” and “Mountain Dew ya.”
“Don’t Smile” is the only dud, with a wry, funny message—“Don’t smile because it happened, baby, cry because it’s over”—but the performance is so sloppy. Carpenter enjoys singing about hate more than heartbreaking defeat. She was recently joined onstage by one of her idols, Kacey Musgraves, to sing the Nancy Sinatra classic “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and it felt like a passing of the torch, because that’s the spirit Sabrina is trying to achieve here. On the vinyl version of the album, Short and sweet, Carpenter concludes her song with “No Need to Say,” where she mocks her “early 20s-plus-year-old self-righteousness.” But if that led to such great songs, no one would ever criticize her judgment.
