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Fun and flirty, with a frothy hook and bitter little kick, Sabrina Carpenter’s single “Espresso” was widely hailed as the Song of the Summer. Its follow-up “Please Please Please” delivered an equally bittersweet umami, as the 25-year-old Disney graduate slipped from her sugariest tone to a menacing growl, warning her liability of an actor-boyfriend: “Don’t embarrass me, motherf*****.”
Given the astounding commercial success of its two lead singles, this record has a lot riding on it. I’m happy to report that those punchy little song-shots aren’t the only cool moments on an album that confidently hair-flips its way between TikTok pop, yacht rock, country and R&B without breaking stride or losing identity.
The aptly named record – Carpenter is shy of 5ft tall and the tracklist is only 12 songs long – is actually the singer’s sixth album. She was just 10 years old when she began posting videos of herself online covering tracks by Adele and Taylor Swift (whom she opened for earlier this year) and only 15 when she released her debut EP, Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying, while also starring in the Disney TV series Girl Meets World. There followed a range of teen bop and some experimental ukulele jams before Carpenter left Disney’s Hollywood Record for Island, on which she released her first “grown up” album Emails I Can’t Send in 2022.
That album saw Carpenter make sharp, fizzy lemonade from the lemons of a tabloid kerfuffle around her personal life involving fellow Disney alum Olivia Rodrigo. It was rumoured that the “blonde girl” referred to on Rodrigo’s 2022 smash hit “Driver’s License” was Carpenter, for whom Rodrigo’s boyfriend allegedly left her. Carpenter played slickly into the drama with her own 2022 single “because i liked a boy” on which she called out the slut-shaming by fans and the media: “Now, I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut/ I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.” In the music video, she winked wittily into the scarlet woman image, scorching in a cherry red dress.
Short n’ Sweet finds Carpenter pressing harder into that man-eating sizzle with lyrics in which she apologises for showing her lover’s private photos to friends (“Juno”) and pouts “Come right on me… where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” on “Bad Chem”. The singer is believed to be dating Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, though rumours of a breakup are floating about and gossip fans are bound to be looking for clues into her relationship with the hard-partying thesp – a tendency she’s somewhat encouraged by casting him as a gangster opposite her in the video for “Please Please Please”.
The album opens with its best song “Taste”: a terrifically glossy slice of FM rock on which Carpenter cautions an ex-paramour’s new girlfriend that every time she kisses him, she’ll also be tasting her. Low-slung electric guitar chords slice through the melody with the casual efficiency of a state-of-the-art, fibreglass rudder. The track dials up the sultry pout without losing the sense of heartbreak in the undertow. Triumphantly nonchalant, Carpenter sounds like she’s singing the blunt lines with her sunglasses on, as Eighties drum pad effects catch the light like sun on a calm sea. It’s the lack of friction that creates exhilaration and melancholy.
First mined at the beginning of the decade by the likes of Florence + The Machine and Maggie Rogers, this kind of late Seventies, early Eighties yacht rock is having a moment. Carpenter also plucks the strings of the current country revival with the snappy “Slim Pickins” on which she scrolls through “all the douchebags on my phone” to the skippy finger-pickin’ of a yee-haw guitar.
Though the Nineties R&B of “Good Graces” is a little forgettable, the savvy snark she puts into ballads like “Dumb and Poetic” and “Lie to Girls” are wincingly memorable. Although their fans originally divided into two camps, Carpenter and Rodrigo share a similarly unapologetic style. Rodrigo stans would find much to love in all the sour sucker-punching here if they can get past the alleged feud between the two stars.
Short n’ Sweet ends with the unexpectedly Laurel Canyon-y strum-along of “Coincidence”. Imagine a 21st-century version of Crosby Stills Nash and Young with Joni Mitchell singing along around a beach fire and you’re there. The whole thing is delightfully caffeinated: Short n’ Sweet is full of hiss and steam, grinding gears and deep kicks beneath the shining chrome surfaces.
