2024-08-24 02:00:03
There are three certified plateaus of Sabrina Carpenter consciousness, according to most gurus of pop-girl-ology.
The level of Sabrina sentience held by most adults perceives this blond ball of radiance to have materialized out of the air this April with the instant song-of-the-summer contender “Espresso.” That’s the tune with the irresistible post-disco, 1980s roller-rink groove (though, as Dan Charnas explained in Slate, it’s a lot more complicated than that) and the sublimely syntax-scrambled lyrics like “That’s that me espresso” and “I Mountain Dew it for ya” (which are not any more complicated than that). A portion of this crowd will also be aware of Carpenter’s lilting cosmic-cowgirl follow-up “Please Please Please,” which, as my colleague Chris Molanphy explained in June, actually charted higher than “Espresso”—and which I personally prefer a bit, mainly for one of the all-time-great deployments of the word motherfucker—but now, in the last stretch of summer, stands a couple of notches lower than its caffeinated cousin in Billboard’s seasonal rankings, which seems celestially just.
If anyone in this cohort happened to hear that Carpenter’s album Short n’ Sweet was being released Friday, they would probably muse, “Hmm, wonder if the full-length debut will live up to those two singles?”
A subset of us, however, had already achieved degree two of Sabrinawareness: We heard about her in 2021 when Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” blew up, followed by the album Sour, and Carpenter was reputed to be the other woman in a tug-of-war over some hunk of boy whose betrayal fueled all of Rodrigo’s songs. All concerned were somehow linked by the Disney Channel. We were probably also dimly cognizant that Carpenter put out an answer song called “Skin” and a subsequent 2022 album, Emails I Can’t Send, which also addressed the matter in songs like “Because I Liked a Boy,” with a video depicting a literal circus to show what the Rodrigo donnybrook had done to Carpenter’s life. That album also featured the thankfully unrelated breakout hit “Nonsense,” followed by “Feather,” with a video that got Carpenter in hot holy water with the Catholic Church. Then Carpenter was invited to open for Taylor Swift on a couple of legs of the “Eras” tour this year, partly owing to Swift’s own tedious rumored spat with Rodrigo over something or other, which was how Carpenter had ascended to a place where the “Espresso” phenomenon could happen.
This subgroup would have anticipated Short n’ Sweet thinking, “So, will this second album break away from the heavy Swift mimicry on Emails and realize the cheeky potential of those few hits?”
But this cohort, too, lived in darkness. I knew vaguely that Carpenter had put out some songs in her years laboring in the mines of Disney TV, which I assumed were disposable fluff. But the true adepts who inhabit the third and highest circle of Carpenter consciousness have known all along that, actually, Short n’ Sweet is only Carpenter’s second major-label album. In fact, after the age of 14, the Pennsylvania-born teen singer and actress had a whole recording career on Disney-affiliated Hollywood Records, which began with fittingly childish, gentle self-affirmation tunes but quickly grew more sophisticated and by 2019 was pointing clearly toward her adult style.
Short n’ Sweet is thus the 25-year-old Carpenter’s sixth studio album. Rather like one of 2024’s other breakthrough artists, Chappell Roan, Carpenter is an “overnight success” only if you posit an alternate Earth where the nocturnal rotations last eight or nine years. And this album feels exactly like one made by a former apprentice who’s now in command. It sparkles with confidence, streaked through with the jadedness of one who’s seen a few trials. It’s teen pop all grown up and in fact sometimes deliberately evokes the sound of Carpenter’s turn-of-the-century Disney-kid predecessors Britney, Christina, and Justin, while steering pointedly wide of the traps and treasons that befell them. But its musical and lyrical vocabulary is also more varied than that. And a lot dirtier.
It’s as a poet laureate of sex that Carpenter’s strengths shine brightest on this album. She’s been campaigning for the designation for a year or two with her improvised (or at least hastily planned) codas to her live performances of “Nonsense.” They usually include a shoutout to the city or nation she’s touring, rhymed with a tribute to the carnal arts: “How to ride it, I can think of five ways/ My head goes so hard I’m giving migraines/ How loud do you get in Buenos Aires!” or “Boy, come over, this is not a drill/ He said, ‘Get on top,’ I said, ‘I will’/ Then he made me come—to Brazil!” But maybe the best, or at least most insolent, was the one she did for BBC Radio 1 that was quickly taken off official channels, which referred to, let’s say, the slang meaning of the British broadcaster’s initials, along with the fact that they had expressly asked her not to.
That track record ought to relieve any doubt that Carpenter’s the one writing most of the sex jokes on Short n’ Sweet, like threatening on “Good Graces” that if a boyfriend doesn’t treat her well, “I’ll tell the world you finish your chores prematurely,” or pretty much every word of “Juno,” which, by way of the 2007 indie film about a knocked-up teen, uses its title as a synonym for pregnancy: “If you love me right, then who knows? I might let you make me Juno,” since after all, “One of me is cute, but two, though?” That song and “Bed Chem”—an abbreviation for “bed chemistry” that will be common online parlance before you finish reading this sentence—are vying for the title of horniest track, and “Bed Chem” definitely has the most penis-size euphemisms. But I think “Juno” wins, not only because its music is more racingly buoyant, but because it just goes ahead and says, “Hold me and explore me/ I’m so fuckin’ horny.”
This is one of the ways that Carpenter surpasses and sheds her Swift influence. While Swift is often sensual in her songs, she can rarely be direct about sex without sounding very self-conscious about being so adult and naughty. And while she can be wickedly sharp when skewering herself and others, she’s seldom just casually funny. Carpenter sounds totally at ease with both sex and jokes, and especially with how often the two go together. You certainly see that in the new-this-morning, mock-horror video for the opening track, “Taste,” featuring Gen Z’s own scream queen Jenna Ortega.
The raunch and sarcasm aren’t just for their own sake, though it would be enough if they were. It’s all in service to the album’s overall intent, which, as she put it to Paper magazine, is to chronicle the most recent “series of unfortunate events I’ve encountered in relationships” (making a perfect Gen Z kid-culture reference)—and, by extension, to provide a grim survey of the contemporary dating scene. Listening to Short n’ Sweet, I often feel like I’m reading a good feminist website’s gossip and advice columnist, a report from an unusually salty-mouthed sociologist, or some blend of Shere Hite and Dorothy Parker.
The subtext of a lot of the songs is much sadder than their surfaces, but because of the energy she brings to them, I seldom really feel sad for Carpenter here. She sounds pretty sure that in the long run she’ll be fine. I’m just waiting for the next zinger to strike down whoever’s making her sad, usually some disappointing dude, occasionally herself. She’s become ever more adept at eviscerating fuckbois—witness the bloody cadaver–strewn floor in the “Feather” video—like the one here who’s not the “Sharpest Tool” in the shed: “We had sex, I met your best friends/ Then a bird flies by and you forget.” (Though the rest of the song never quite equals that opening.) Or the sensitive-posturing guy in the folkie-strummed “Dumb & Poetic”: “Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken/ Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” (Who expected Boygenius’ song from last year to be one-upped so quickly in the skeptical Leonard Cohen–reference sweepstakes?) I’m not sure which is more devastating, that or “I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life.”
Aside from the occasional good lay, Carpenter really makes it sound like an ordeal to be a young straight woman in 2024, “Since the good ones call their exes wasted/ And since the Lord forgot my gay awakenin’,” as she sings on the next track, “Slim Pickins.” The title there is also a nod to the prominent banjo line; it’s one of several songs here that lean a little country and would have fit in well on Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 Golden Hour, an album praised everywhere at the time that sometimes seems forgotten now. Not by Carpenter, who brought Musgraves up onstage in San Francisco this month to duet on “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” calling her “an artist that I’ve just loved for my entire life.” (Which must have made Musgraves feel old at 36.)
There’s also an acoustic cast to the penultimate track, “Lie to Girls”—which really should be the closer rather than the comparatively weak and sleepy “Don’t Smile.” It’s here that Carpenter really confronts her portion of the problem with the dud dudes, assuring one, in the midst of reaming him out for misbehavior, “You don’t have to lie to girls/ If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves” and then cleverly looping it back: “Like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” And, debate her as you will, she universalizes the issue to her whole gender: “It’s lucky for you I’m just like/ My mother (and my sisters) (all my friends)/ The girl outside the strip club, getting her tarot cards read.”
Carpenter might be said to circle these subjects obsessively here, but, as in those examples, it’s always from fresh angles, and usually quite concisely. She’s down with the aphorism that brevity is the soul of wit: Short n’ Sweet isn’t just a joke about her own under-5-foot stature and the quick expiration dates on many of these liaisons, but truth-in-advertising about the album. It comes in at 12 songs lasting just over 36 minutes in total. Which is a great relief in a year when so many major pop albums, from Swift’s to Beyoncé’s to Post Malone’s, have been clocking in at double-album lengths, justified in substance or not.
If there’s a disappointment here, it might be that “Espresso” stands alone in its giddy word salad–tossing; none of the other songs match its benign contempt for comprehensibility. Likewise, most of the music is either moody or more anthemic, not with the breezy-dancey vibe of the lead single. It’s partly produced by and written with various L.A. music-biz stalwarts—many former associates of One Direction, make what you will of that—and partly with the celebrated/notorious Jack Antonoff. If you require further evidence that it’s not truly his fault that Swift’s past couple of albums have felt so overwrought, may Short n’ Sweet please the court. And really, who else would have had the inspo to quote the riff from Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” in the middle of the period-appropriate Dolly-disco-country of “Please Please Please”?
Whatever Carpenter might have needed to prove here, I’d call it mission accomplished. Someone who, a year ago, seemed somewhat of a footnote to a couple of more famous artists’ stories now seems like a wholly autonomous auteur who’s in it for keeps. Yes, the Sabrina-luminati never questioned that, while it’s dawning on some of us benighted creatures literally today. But at least we finally Mountain Dew’d it, and that’s that, me.
