Sign up for Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This to stay up to date with all things music
Get our Now Hear This email for free
Get our Now Hear This email for free
Fun and flirty, with a frothy chorus and a bitter little kick, Sabrina Carpenter’s single “Espresso” was widely hailed as the song of the summer. The follow-up, “Please, Please, Please,” delivered an equally bittersweet umami, as the 25-year-old Disney alum slipped from her most saccharine tone to a menacing growl, warning of her risk of an actor boyfriend: “Don’t embarrass me, you bitch.”
Given the astonishing commercial success of the first two singles, a lot is riding on this record. I’m happy to report that these punchy little song shots aren’t the only cool moments on an album that confidently jumps between TikTok pop, yacht rock, country, and R&B without losing its stride or identity.
The aptly named album – Carpenter stands just under 5 feet tall and the tracklist includes just 12 songs – is actually the singer’s sixth album. She was just 10 when she started posting videos of herself covering songs by Adele and Taylor Swift (who she opened for earlier this year), and just 15 when she released her debut EP. You can’t blame a girl for tryingwhile he also starred in the Disney television series Life and IA string of teen bop and some experimental ukulele jams followed before Carpenter left Disney’s Hollywood Record and joined Island, where she released her first “grown-up” album. Emails I can’t send in 2022.
With that album, Carpenter made sharp, fizzy lemonade out of the lemons of a tabloid swirl surrounding her personal life, which also involved her former Disney co-star Olivia Rodrigo. The “blonde girl” referenced in Rodrigo’s 2022 hit “Driver’s License” was rumored to be Carpenter, for whom Rodrigo’s boyfriend allegedly left her. Carpenter deftly played into the drama with her own 2022 single “Because I Liked a Boy,” on which she denounced slut-shaming by fans and the media: “Now I’m an adulteress, I’m a slut/ I got death threats for filling semi-trucks.” In the music video, she wittily winked at the image of the scarlet-clad woman glowing in a cherry-red dress.
Short and sweet Carpenter pushes herself even harder into this man-eating sizzle, with lyrics apologizing for showing friends private photos of her lover (“Juno”) and sulking “Come right at me… where are you? Why not me?” in “Bad Chem.” The singer is reportedly dating Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, although rumors of a split are circulating and gossip fans are surely looking for clues about her relationship with the hard-partying actor – a tendency she encourages a little by casting him as a gangster at her side in the video for “Please, Please, Please.”
The album opens with its best song, “Taste”: an impossibly glossy slice of FM rock in which Carpenter warns an ex-lover’s new girlfriend that every time she kisses him, she’ll taste her too. Low-slung electric guitar chords cut through the melody with the casual efficiency of a state-of-the-art fiberglass rudder. The track amplifies the sensual pout without losing the sense of heartbreak in the undercurrent. Triumphantly casual, Carpenter sounds like she’s singing the blunt lines wearing sunglasses, while ’80s drum pad effects catch the light like the sun on a calm sea. It’s the lack of friction that creates elation and melancholy.
That style of late ’70s and early ’80s yacht rock, first exploited by artists like Florence + The Machine and Maggie Rogers earlier in the decade, is making a big comeback right now. Carpenter also plucks the strings of the current country revival with the jaunty “Slim Pickings,” which finds her scrolling through “all the douchebags on my phone” to the bouncy fingerpicking of a Yee Haw guitar.
Although the ’90s R&B of Good Graces is somewhat forgotten, the smart bite she brings to ballads like “Dumb and Poetic” and “Lie to Girls” remains painfully memorable. Although her fans were originally split into two camps, Carpenter and Rodrigo share a similarly uncompromising style. Rodrigo fans would get a lot of enjoyment out of all the sour low blows here if they could put the supposed feud between the two stars behind them.
Short and sweet ends with the unexpected Laurel Canyon-esque strumming of “Coincidence.” Imagine a 21st-century version of Crosby Stills Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell singing along around a beach fire, and you’re there. The whole thing is wonderfully caffeinated: Short and Sweet is full of hiss and steam, grinding gears and deep kicks beneath the shiny chrome surfaces.
