What Sabrina Carpenter Lacks in Originality, She Makes Up For in Personality on Short n’ Sweet

Sabrina Carpenter’s rise to full-fledged pop stardom is one of the year’s most massive level-ups, exceeded only by Chappell Roan, who, like Sabrina, was bolstered by an opening slot on an A-List artist’s tour. While both Sabrina and Chappell both spent years releasing music to varying levels of niche but devoted “middle class” pop audiences before 2024, Carpenter’s ascent follows her Disney Channel-backed come-up, making her success more conventional and precedented than that of the Midwest Princess.

In many ways, Sabrina Carpenter has spent the past few years unfairly stuck in the shadow of another former Disney kid’s success story. This time last year, my own knowledge of Carpenter started with a vague understanding that she was the infamous “blonde girl” that Olivia Rodrigo sang about on “drivers license,” and ended with recognizing her from a music video where she’s riding a bike and talk-singing about an oat milk latte. Or something like that. Following this, she began popping up on my TikTok feed—videos of her on-stage, ab-libbing raunchy, locality-specific outros to her song “Nonsense” with impressive quantity and quality.

In the past few months though, she’s become impossible to ignore, in large part due to (or should I say “Mountain Dew to?”) (I absolutely shouldn’t) her breakout hit “Espresso.” Memes aside, when the “Espresso”-inspired think-pieces began pouring in, touting Short n’ Sweet‘s lead single as an injection of new energy into pop music’s increasingly predictable zeitgeist, I wondered if there was something I was missing every time I heard “Espresso” at a bar or a grocery store or in the back of an Uber. Reports of its originality seemed greatly exaggerated; it really just sounds like a rehash of Doja Cat’s “Say So”—a song that, for most of us, is like taking a pill that transports you straight back to spring of 2020, an era that no one is eager to be reminded of. Still, at this point I suspect that I’ve been Stockholm Syndromed into liking “Espresso” after hearing it literally everywhere, because now I can’t stop wandering around my apartment absentmindedly mumbling to myself “I’m working late / ‘Cause I’m a singerrrr.”

Though “Espresso” is the more ubiquitous single and the true breakout, its follow-up “Please, Please, Please” was the one that earned Carpenter her first #1 hit—and it’s the superior song. Its roller disco-meets-rodeo sparkle shines through at the sweet-and-sour chorus (even if I’ve become unable to hear Carpenter’s deep, twangy pronunciation of “motherfucker” without being reminded of Lana Del Rey’s burbling delivery of “Walk into the room you know you made my eyes burn” during her infamous SNL performance of “Blue Jeans”). Carpenter’s delivery is like Lana’s if she’d actually stuck the landing.

Short n’ Sweet is front-loaded, coming in white-hot with “Taste,” as Carpenter sings over teasing guitar licks and opens the album by winking at both her record’s title and at her diminutive stature: “Oh, I leave quite an impression / Five feet, to be exact.” “The bubbly, glam-pop opener has the album’s catchiest chorus and bridge, as well as the most star-making, personality-packed vocal performance of Carpenter’s career thus far. She’s no stranger to high-profile love triangles, or to using them as inspiration for her music (“because i liked a boy” was her rebuttal to being unfairly cast as the villain by a faceless public when she became embroiled in the celebrity gossip saga that fueled the fervor around Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, Sour).

On “Taste,” she makes the best of this tabloid-and-songwriting fodder, amping up the drama with a goofy, gory Death Becomes Her-parodying music video co-starring Jenna Ortega—and lyrics like “He’s funny now all his jokes hit different / Guess who he learned that from?” which, on a meta-referential level, give the listener a sense of—dare I say déjà vu? With a healthy dose of both silliness and self-awareness, she capitalizes on the public narrative without forgoing its central relatability or leaning too heavily into the Easter Eggification of personal pop music. Less lethal but still intriguing is “Sharpest Tool,” which embeds quippy lines like “We never talk about how you found God at your ex’s house / Always made sure that the phone was face down / Seems like overnight I’m just a bitch you hate now” into a piece of intimate, Postal Service-reminiscent techno—a surprising and welcome turn from Carpenter. The way the line “We never talk about it” seems to float atop an exhale puts her breathy soprano to stunning use.

Elsewhere on the record though, the litany of breakup songs about a famous guy who left Carpenter to slink back to his also-famous ex lose their luster, to the point that the love-triangle narrative starts to become the most interesting thing about the songs themselves. It’s never a good sign when the personas of the people involved in the music overshadow the artistry of the person making it—and it’s definitely not a good sign when you get to the chorus and start to think “This pop song could’ve been a DeuxMoi blind item.”

On “Coincidence,” Carpenter flips the tired trend therapy-speak pop on its head with a cheeky couplet: “Last night you had no doubt / Now you’re holding space for her tongue in your mouth.” Less clever is a line like “Your car drove itself from LA to her thighs,” but neither moment can rescue the track from sounding as bland and uninspired as Harry Styles does whenever he tries on a similarly skin-deep Lauren Canyon schtick—complete with stop-and-start acoustic strumming, hand claps and mindless “na-na-na” backing vocals. Similarly boring are the two final tracks—the generically pretty, Jack Antonoff-produced, up-talking folk-pop ballad “Lie To Girls,” and the elevator music sheen and Dr. Seuss-to-yearbook-quote-parroting “Don’t Smile.” But all of these pale in comparison to the worst offender, “Dumb & Poetic,” a dull bedroom pop song that comes off almost as faux-deep as the pseudo-intellectual softboy it’s lambasting. It was cool when Lana and boygenius did it—mostly because their invocation came with a clear understanding of and appreciation for his work—but I think it’s time we put a moratorium on songwriters name-dropping Leonard Cohen, especially if they’re just gonna throw his legacy under the bus and boil it down to a signifier of pretension.

Perhaps, somewhere between the “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please” stops on the Short n’ Sweet album rollout, the Sabrina Carpenter hype train set her up for not quite failure, but for middling success.While it’s generally pleasant and charismatic, Sabrina Carpenter’s breakout record is by no means some indicator of a major sea change. It’s simply a culmination of the last decade or so of pop music, all of its predictable influences blended into a slurry until smooth—like the $23 Erewhon smoothie named after it.

A song like “Bed Chem” is a microcosm of this. It sounds perfectly pleasant and showcases Carpenter’s impressive vocal abilities, but it’s made up of lowest common denominators—Future Nostalgia-era Dua Lipa disco pastiche, the riffs-over-diction sigh-singing popularized by Ariana Grande, a Swiftian pre-chorus that’s shockingly well-mimicked all the way down to the delivery of each syllable—“Who’s the cute boy with the white jacket and the thick accent?” sounds like it was lifted straight from 1989. Or Lover. Or hell, even Midnights.)

It’s harder to accuse Carpenter of actively ripping off any of these artists than it is to see Short n’ Sweet as a passive casualty of a pop landscape that’s been growing more and more stylistically homogenous. I’m unsure which offense would be worse. Still, even if the hook of “Good Graces” sounds almost identical to that of “no tears left to cry,” at least Sabrina Carpenter can say that she’s made the best Ariana Grande song of 2024. She’s also made the year’s best Kacey Musgraves track: “Slim Pickins” makes me wonder what a full cowgirl-glam country record from Carpenter might sound like. It captures the emotional intimacy that tracks like “Dumb & Poetic” and “Lie To Girls” can only feign, and it does so without sacrificing Carpenter’s humor, which is one the greatest weapons in her arsenal: “Since the good ones call their exes wasted / And since the lord forgot my gay awakening / I’ll just be here in the kitchen / Servin’ up some moanin’ and bitchin’.”

Carpenter is at her best when she’s taking big swings, when her preferred mode of seduction is silly-sexy—when she’s not afraid to be a little ridiculous or a little tacky, like the fuzzy pink handcuffs that she wants to slip into on the deliriously horny “Juno,” perhaps the most fun and light-hearted addition to the recent canon of baby fever pop. Sure, a woman in her mid-20s begging her man to get her teen-pregnant (as the title’s film reference would suggest) kinda feels like Ilana from Broad City exclaiming “I’m 27. What am I? A child bride?” but the song’s punchline just makes it all the more effervescent—as does the ecstatic exclamation point of “You make me wanna make you fall in love—ow!” It’s shining moments like these—each giggly one-liner or crystalline high note—that make me, an admitted skeptic, want to hop back on the Sabrina Carpenter hype train, if only to see where it goes next. Maybe she’s not saving pop music on Short n’ Sweet, but maybe she doesn’t need to. Maybe she’s just here for a good time.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.