Riding off the minor success of 2022’s emails i can’t send, an album of heavy-handed confessionals that somewhat profited off her brief falling-out with fellow Disney alum Olivia Rodrigo, “Espresso” couldn’t have come at a more pivotal moment in Sabrina Carpenter’s career. A breezy, beach-rock romp chock-full of ingenious quotables, punctured with a deadpan delivery: “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / that’s that me espresso.”
It just so happened to capture the zeitgeist, aligning itself with the hedonistic ideals of Charli xcx’s BRAT summer, Tinashe’s match-my-freak anthem “Nasty,” or Chappell Roan’s Sapphic clap-chants which dominated the airwaves this summer. That “Please Please Please,” a twinkly yet sardonic ballad in the key of synthpop imperialist Jack Antonoff, was an even bigger hit to mean something: Carpenter had finally made it. With Short n’ Sweet, her most flamboyant project yet, Sabrina Carpenter ejects herself into the main-pop-girl troposphere.
Since her halcyon days on the Disney channel, signing with Hollywood Records in 2013 before joining the cast of Girl Meets World, her music has always been reflexive to whatever’s trendy in the pop music landscape. Acoustic-led songs about heartbreak: late-2000s Taylor Swift or debut Eyes Wide Open (2015)? Growing pains doused in a warbling 808: Ariana Grande or the Singular Acts (2018-19)? Ironically, the inflections of pop-punk on emails i can’t send even sound like an uncanny Olivia Rodrigo.
This problem continues to manifest its way onto Short n’ Sweet, marking yet another pop star’s pivot to country— see Beyonce’s folkloric reclamation of the genre on COWBOY CARTER or Post Malone’s frat boy antics on F-1 Trillion. On “Slim Pickins,” a Dolly Parton-esque archetype is damned to a life of awkward situationships “since the Lord forgot my gay awakening.” Whereas “Coincidence” tackles love and betrayal with a giddy incongruence, “Don’t Smile” soothes with its dreamy steel pads. However, she still leaves room for experimentation— the buoyant “Good Graces” is informed by the 2-stepping nonchalance of K-pop group NewJeans and the 90s Miami bass scene.
Sabrina Carpenter even reveals herself to be a sort of wordsmith, where everything’s a double entendre– the movie Juno and the beverage Mountain Dew effortlessly converted into coy colloquialisms. In less compelling moments, Carpenter’s lyricism dwells on the plights of modern dating: litanies of male manipulators who worship Leonard Cohen, are fluent in therapy-speak, or don’t know the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” With each line on the record delivered with a nudge and wink, Carpenter has a lightheartedness at once glib and earnest.
Listen to: Espresso, Juno, Taste
