There’s never been a pop-girl summer anything like 2024 — ever — and Sabrina Carpenter is one of the crucial reasons why. With “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” she can claim two prime Song of the Summer contenders. But she caps off her amazing ascendance with Short n’ Sweet, her full-on coronation album, flaunting her knack for turning romantic roadkill into flippantly brilliant pop. Sabrina’s give-a-fucks aren’t just on vacation — they’re in a coma. These songs are usually filthy, always funny, often mean, yet she roasts herself along with everyone else. As she admits, “I can make a shitshow look a whole lot like forever.”
The 25-year-old former Disney child star has spent years honing her skills — Short n’ Sweet is her sixth album, building on her 2022 breakthrough Emails I Can’t Send. But like the summer’s other world-beating queens — Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Tinashe — she’s a crafty veteran seizing ingenue energy, just because she wants it. (She’s one of the only singers who can boast she got shaded in a Number One hit, then went on to score one of her own.) She knew the world was watching this time, and Short n’ Sweet seals her arrival as a pop superstar.
“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” are two of the highlights, but they’re not even the best tunes here. That honor goes to the future karaoke classic “Lie to Girls,” with Carpenter lamenting over acoustic guitar, “You don’t have to lie to girls/If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” She mourns the romantic self-delusions of her mother, her friends, even “the girl outside the strip club getting her tarot cards read.” (The funniest tarot burn since Joni Mitchell went to Bleecker Street on Hejira to watch eighteen bucks go up in smoke.) But as she sings, “We love to read the cold hard facts and swear they’re incorrect/We love to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest.”
Sabrina might crank out rhymed couplets like a twisted goddaughter of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Pope, yet her sensibility is her own. She’s obsessed with “Bed Chem,” and why it fails to solve the problems that go with men, from infidelity to bad grammar. (One dude doesn’t know the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re” — a red flag for sure.) She regrets the fact that she’s stuck with straight guys, “since the good ones call their exes wasted/And since the Lord forgot my gay awakening.”
Short n’ Sweet is impressively focused — 12 songs in 36 minutes, no features, no guests, no missteps. She co-wrote each with Amy Allen, who had her own summer hit in “Girl with a Problem.” Her producers include John Ryan, Ian Kirkpatrick, and Justin Bunetta. Jack Antonoff did four of the highlights, including “Please Please Please” and “Lie to Girls.”
There’s more banjo and acoustic guitar here than anyone would have guessed, mostly used for its percussive snap, as in the finger-picking rhythm hooks of “Slim Pickins” and “Sharpest Tool.” The whole country/synth-pop vibe evokes Madonna’s disco-cowgirl phase in her Music era — somehow Ms. Ciccone’s “Don’t Tell Me” has grown into a major pop touchstone for our moment.
“Taste” is a delectably vicious opener, as she tells her ex’s new girl, “You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you.” But the flip side is “Coincidence,” where the ex is back in the game, as she sings, “Last week you didn’t have any doubts/This week you’re holding space for her tongue in your mouth.” In the Eighties-style synth-fluffer “Bed Chem,” she celebrates shameless lust to the point where she gets downright Shakespearean, in her ability to rhyme “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie” with “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”
Sabrina rips so many boys into so many shreds here, but one of her funniest targets is the literary poseur in “Dumb & Poetic.” She sneers, “Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken/Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” The late Montreal poet-sage would have been totally honored by this tribute, just as he would enjoyed Boygenius’ equally harsh “Leonard Cohen” last year. Cohen loved mocking male vanity (including his own) the way these songwriters do, and he’d appreciate how Sabrina turns her romantic woes into barbs like “Save all your breath for your floor meditation” and “I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life.” Also, they both have a flair for outlandish rhymes — somewhere, Cohen is probably kicking himself for not stretching out “Hallelujah” with “dream-come-true ya” and “Mountain Dew ya.”
“Don’t Smile” is the only dud, with a comically surly message — “don’t smile because it happened, baby, cry because it’s over” — but too much droop in the execution. Carpenter just has more fun singing about hatred than bummed-out defeat. One of her idols, Kacey Musgraves, recently joined her onstage to duet on the Nancy Sinatra rage-queen classic “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and it felt like a passing of the torch, because that’s the spirit Sabrina aims for here. On the vinyl edition of Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter signs off with “Needless to Say,” where she makes fun of her own “entertaining early-twenties judgment.” But if it resulted in songs this great, nobody’s knocking her judgment at all.