Short and Sweet may be Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth album, but she says it feels like her second. Following her creative breakthrough in 2022 with “Emails I Can’t Send” — which we’ll call her “Disney liberation” after nearly a decade as a child star — “S n’ S” is a powerful next step in her evolution as an artist and person.
You already know this woman’s personality from the album’s two lead singles, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” and their videos: beautiful but strong, funny, sassy, confident, sexually explicit, and fiercely sultry, but not without insecurities and heartaches. The songs here are almost entirely about love, of all kinds: real love, stupid love, obsessions, the love that I should really know is better than that is actually lust, revenge, both sides of betrayal, and especially in the last two songs, heartbreak. But mostly, besides the effervescent hooks that fans have come to expect from the album’s two lead singles, there’s more of the “did she just say what I thought she said?” in the lyrics, which are full of f-bombs, sexual innuendos, and hilarious insults that are all the more withering because she sings almost all of them so sweetly.
Like what? “Try to sound like a soft-spoken, well-mannered person/ Dance to Leonard Cohen’s lyrics” (“Stupid and Poetic”); “Last week, you had no doubts/ This week, you’re keeping room for her tongue in your mouth” (“Serendipity”); “I showed it to my friends, and then we clapped/ Sorry if I felt like you were just an object” (“Juno”); “Where are you? Why don’t you hit me?” (“Bed Chem”); “I heard you two are back together and if it’s true/ You’re going to have to taste me when he kisses you” (“Taste”); “A broken heart is one thing, and my ego is another/ I beg you, don’t embarrass me, you son of a bitch” (“Please, Please, Please”); and, er, “I’m so horny” (“Juno”). We can have fun but don't mess with me.
True to its title, the album quickly shifts between a variety of moods and genres over the course of its 12 songs and 36 minutes, blending pop, R&B, alternative rock, and even country into a cohesive, surprising whole. There are flashes of ’80s synths, ’90s R&B, and the occasional whiff of Ariana and Taylor, but part of the album’s cohesion comes from the placement of complementary songs together. For example, the sharp sweetness of opener “Taste” transitions seamlessly into the Dolly Parton-meets-ABBA “Please Please Please,” even though they don’t sound alike, and the two acoustic-based songs—the country-leaning “Dumb and Poetic” and “Slim Pickins”—are strung together, creating a mini-soundscape midway through the album.
Though the album features many of the same contributors from “Emails,” co-writer Amy Allen (who’s coming off a breakout year with Tate McRae and Justin Timberlake in addition to every song on “Short n’ Sweet”) and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan (both One Direction alumni and Harry Styles) have stepped into the forefront, with Jack Antonoff leaving his diverse mark on four songs. Unsurprisingly, Taylor’s vocals feature prominently on one of his contributions, “Sharpest Tool,” but you’ll also notice a bit of “Bed Chem,” which layers a Swiftian-style multi-track melody over a light R&B bed.
But make no mistake, this is a Carpenter show all the way, and the songs here are brilliantly versatile: “Taste” could be an alt-rock anthem if the guitars were louder, “Good Graces” is a fast-paced blast of ’90s pop R&B, and “Slim Pickins” only needs a fiddle to be a full-fledged country song, but instead they blend several styles into a diverse but consistent sound that continues throughout the album.
But after all the chutzpah, sex and swagger, the album ends on a bittersweet note with the melancholic “Lie to Girls” (“You don’t have to lie to girls/If they love you, they’ll lie to themselves”) and the closing track “Don’t Smile,” a Janet Jackson-esque ballad in which Carpenter’s powerfully resonant voice abandons any pretense of toughness and turns an old cliché on its head—“Don’t smile because it happened/Cry because it’s over”—and sings wistfully of a lost love. It’s an unexpectedly tender ending to an album that proves not only that Carpenter is a multifaceted singer, but also a multidimensional star.
