As incubators of pop stardom go, the Disney corporation has, rather unexpectedly, outlasted around two decades of dramatic shifts in the music industry. While “The Mickey Mouse Club”—a show that helped prepare pop singers such as Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera for megastardom—no longer exists, some of this generation’s biggest talents spent their youth working on Disney soundstages. A few have had more direct paths than others: Olivia Rodrigo, Gen Z’s pop-punk princess, rose to fame as Nina Salazar-Roberts on Disney’s “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” a lightly satirical TV show inspired by the eponymous films. Her recording career eclipsed the acting during the show’s second season, when her début single, “Drivers License,” broke records on Spotify and made her one of the youngest artists ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
One of the subjects of “Drivers License,” a song about a love triangle, was a “blonde girl” rumored to be the singer Sabrina Carpenter: “She’s so much older than me / She’s everything I’m insecure about.” (Rodrigo was eighteen at the time; Carpenter was twenty-two.) The success of “Drivers License” gave Carpenter a newfound notoriety but not necessarily success. Carpenter is also a former Disney kid, but it took her longer to become a household name. From 2014 to 2017, she starred in “Girl Meets World,” a Disney Channel spinoff of “Boy Meets World,” playing Maya Hart, a brassy and sharp-witted teen-ager from a broken home—the type of kid who was just bad enough to get into sparring matches with teachers. When one of those teachers calls her the “future mini-mart employee of the month,” Maya doesn’t flinch. “Would I be making more money than you?” she asks him.
This is exactly the sort of brattily confident retort that can be found all over “Short n’ Sweet,” Carpenter’s new album, released last week. “Break my heart and I swear I’m movin’ on / With your favorite athlete,” she warns a lover on “Good Graces,” a cheeky and self-assured track styled after early-two-thousands pop and R. & B. Carpenter released five albums over the past decade, but “Short n’ Sweet” represents her entry into pop’s major leagues. As a teen signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records, she pursued music alongside her acting but rarely made an impact outside of the Disney universe—an ecosystem that, for Carpenter, was more of a silo than a launchpad. In 2021, Carpenter left Hollywood Records and went on to sign with Island. She released a record titled “Emails I Can’t Send,” and earned a spot opening for Taylor Swift on some international dates of the Eras Tour.
But it wasn’t until Carpenter was announced as a performer at this year’s Coachella that an unlikely breakout opportunity arrived. As part of the promotion for the gig, she released “Espresso,” a track she’d written the previous summer during a vacation in France. The song became not just the biggest of Carpenter’s career but one of the biggest global hits of the summer. Fans latched on to her irresistible delivery of a handful of lyrics that were equal parts savvy and silly, sticky phrases that cut the sexed-up mood of the song with humor: “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / That’s that me espresso,” she sings over a faintly disco-funky production. After a decade that saw pop trends move in the direction of the moody and sombre, Carpenter arrived as a kind of self-knowing pop Barbie, perfuming the genre with pleasure and absurdity.
If “Espresso” is slyly dopey, most of “Short n’ Sweet” is just sly. Much of it was written during the same France sessions as “Espresso,” the album is a punchy thirty-six minutes, and it effectively establishes Carpenter as one of the most clever performers of her generation. The qualities that served her well as an actress playing a feisty high schooler are the same ones that make “Short n’ Sweet” so compelling: Carpenter addresses her love interests with a mixture of disdain, lust, and affectionate one-upmanship. “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?” she wonders on “Slim Pickins,” a folksy lament about the scarcity of intelligent men. “This boy doesn’t even know the difference between ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they are,’ ” she sings in a whispery twang reminiscent of Miley Cyrus and Kacey Musgraves. Carpenter, who wrote most of the tracks alongside the indie-folk singer turned pop songwriter Amy Allen, is a sharp lyricist and an evocative vocalist. Whether she is speaking to a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, or that ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, Carpenter has a wry, petulant specificity that rewards close listening.
One thing that sets Carpenter apart from peers is that she recognizes the value of theatre and pomp in pop music as much as authenticity. “Short n’ Sweet” finds her exploring a variety of production styles, from throwback R. & B. to jangly pop-country and acoustic-guitar tracks that showcase her as a singer-songwriter. These sounds are threaded together by Carpenter’s playful, sharp-tongued persona, a winking embrace of her role as “that blonde girl.” There’s a layer of mischief and camp to her storytelling, as on “Please Please Please,” a song about dating someone she couldn’t take out in mixed company. “I know you’re craving some fresh air / but the ceiling fan is so nice,” she sings in a mildly unhinged attempt at persuasion. The album is also infused with the libidinal disquiet of a hormone-crazed young person, with slangy, meme-ready declarations of friskiness. “God bless your dad’s genetics,” Carpenter sings on a pert and raunchy track whose chorus—“I might let you make me Juno”—invokes the 2007 film about teen pregnancy.
“Short n’ Sweet” opens with “Taste,” a shimmery and exuberant track about the experience of sharing a man with a rival. “I heard you’re back together, and if that’s true / You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you,” she sings in the chorus, both a threat and a boast. It’s a bold opener—a statement of intent from a woman recently freed from the figurative chastity belt of a Disney career. “People maybe wrote me off, from my past as a Disney kid,” she recently told one interviewer. “It’s been years, man. Move on,” she admonished another, after he inquired about the cancellation of “Girl Meets World.” And yet Carpenter’s experience as a tween actress has surely carried over into this stage of her career. “Short n’ Sweet” is the work of not just an artist but an entertainer. ♦