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Short N' Sweet is finally here, and without a doubt, the queen of delectable, tart, ear-candy pop is none other than Sabrina Carpenter. After nearly a decade in the music industry, Sabrina has burst like an overripe cherry to the very top of every chart imaginable with tracks from Short N' Sweet, her sixth studio album overall and second on Island Records. In the follow-up to her career-changing 2022 album Emails I Can't Send, Sabrina is more adventurous, more glitzy, and more brutally honest (if that's somehow possible). Short N' Sweet is dripping with sugary romance, complete with the bold bite that gives Sabrina Carpenter one of the best albums of the year.
Stand-out tracks: "Taste" "Espresso" "Bed Chem"
My Favorites: "Good Graces" "Don't Smile" "Juno"
"Taste" is that aforementioned bold bite. Right out of the gate, Sabrina makes it clear that she has no beef with her ex's rekindled romance, but she's certainly not one to allow someone else to get the last word. A pop-rock gem amidst an album of disco-pop and acoustic-pop, "Taste" is nonchalant and confessional as she belts out lines like "Well, I heard you're back together and if that's true/You'll just have to taste me when he's kissin' you" and "Hе's funny now, all his jokes hit different/Guеss who he learned that from?"
"Good Graces" and "Please Please Please" see Carpenter at her most sweetly ruthless, keeping her romantic partners in line with her angelic demeanor, but "don't mistake [her] nice for naive". She's singing out power plays on top of the most addictive and inventive production. A few of the best? (1)"If you wanna go and be stupid/Don't do it in front of me/If you don't wanna cry to my music/Don't make me hate you prolifically." (2)"I won't give a f*ck about you" (repeated x6). (3) "You should stay in my good graces/Or I'll switch it up like that so fast/'Cause no one's more amazin'/At turnin' lovin' into hatred." And the crown jewel? "Heartbreak is one thing/My egos another/I beg you don't embarrass me/Motherf*cker."
Some call it a skip, others (myself included) call Dolly-style country track "Slim Pickins" the glue that holds all the pieces of Short N' Sweet together. Layers upon layers of sugary-sweet vocal harmonies carry Carpenter through a facetiously woeful ode to the impossibility of finding "A boy who's nice that breathes." Its banjo-tinged production is the perfect complement to its honky-tonk inspired lyricism: "Since the good ones call their exes wasted/And since the Lord forgot my gay awakenin'/Then I'll just be here in the kitchen/Servin' up some moanin' and bitchin'."
The sparkling, flirtatious, R&B-influenced "Bed Chem" takes the cake for the most erotically-charged of Short N' Sweet's tracklisting, but amorous "Juno" is the album's standout (next to unofficial official Song of the Summer "Espresso"). A twinkling, 2000s-style (because yes, she is referencing that movie) classic pop gem, "Juno" has Sabrina finally having found the one who she might let "lock [her] down" and tell her "I'm the only only only only one." But, as Sabrina does, she reminds her new romance that this is completely on her terms - "You make me wanna make you fall in love."
But don't think that cheek and wit is all Sabrina Carpenter has going for her. "Dumb & Poetic" sees her just so mad she could cry over the most pretentious bonehead she's had the misfortune to fall for. "Don't Smile" illustrates the numbness of the laying-in-bed-eating-ice-cream type of heartbreak, watching the world move on without you. "Lie to Girls" is perhaps her most insightful, unromanticized perspective on relationships, as she sings about the ends of the Earth girls will go to just to hold on to something less than they deserve: "You don't even have to try/Turn you into a good guy/You don't have to lift a finger/It's lucky for you I'm just like/My mother and my sisters/All my friends."
What seems to make Sabrina Carpenter such a massive success is that she unabashedly embraces her womanhood, flaunts her faux pas, and still won’t shut up about how great her life is. She’s unafraid and unserious half the time but is so deeply confident in knowing what makes Sabrina Sabrina. That deep understanding of who she is as a person and an artist has allowed her to spin a narrative that’s all her own, one that's composed of glossed-over lyrical digs and shameless innuendos amidst the most stunning of vocal lines and punchy production in pop music. She's been working her decade-long career to have a hit album like Short N' Sweet, so what made this one The One? That it's the Sabrina-led revolution of female fortitude in pop music that other women seem to have been waiting to hear.
AM I OBSESSED?
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