There’s by no means been a pop-girl summer time something like 2024 — ever — and Sabrina Carpenter is among the essential the reason why. With “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” she will be able to declare two prime Tune of the Summer time contenders. However she caps off her wonderful ascendance with Brief n’ Sweet, her full-on coronation album, flaunting her knack for turning romantic roadkill into flippantly sensible pop. Sabrina’s give-a-fucks aren’t simply on trip — they’re in a coma. These songs are normally filthy, at all times humorous, usually imply, but she roasts herself together with everybody else. As she admits, “I could make a shitshow look an entire lot like eternally.”
The 25-year-old former Disney youngster star has spent years honing her expertise — Brief n’ Candy is her sixth album, constructing on her 2022 breakthrough Emails I Can’t Ship. However just like the summer time’s different world-beating queens — Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Tinashe — she’s a artful veteran seizing ingenue vitality, simply because she needs it. (She’s one of many solely singers who can boast she bought shaded in a Quantity One hit, then went on to attain one in every of her personal.) She knew the world was watching this time, and Brief n’ Candy seals her arrival as a pop famous person.
“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” are two of the highlights, however they’re not even the perfect tunes right here. That honor goes to the long run karaoke traditional “Deceive Women,” with Carpenter lamenting over acoustic guitar, “You don’t must lie to women/In the event that they such as you, they’ll simply mislead themselves.” She mourns the romantic self-delusions of her mom, her buddies, even “the woman outdoors the strip membership getting her tarot playing cards learn.” (The funniest tarot burn since Joni Mitchell went to Bleecker Avenue on Hejira to observe eighteen bucks go up in smoke.) However as she sings, “We like to learn the chilly laborious info and swear they’re incorrect/We like to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest.”
Sabrina would possibly crank out rhymed couplets like a twisted goddaughter of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Pope, but her sensibility is her personal. She’s obsessive about “Mattress Chem,” and why it fails to resolve the issues that go together with males, from infidelity to dangerous grammar. (One dude doesn’t know the distinction between “there,” “their,” and “they’re” — a pink flag for certain.) She regrets the truth that she’s caught with straight guys, “because the good ones name their exes wasted/And because the Lord forgot my homosexual awakening.”
Brief n’ Candy is impressively centered — 12 songs in 36 minutes, no options, no friends, no missteps. She co-wrote every with Amy Allen, who had her personal summer time hit in “Woman with a Downside.” Her producers embody John Ryan, Ian Kirkpatrick, and Justin Bunetta. Jack Antonoff did 4 of the highlights, together with “Please Please Please” and “Deceive Women.”
There’s extra banjo and acoustic guitar right here than anybody would have guessed, principally used for its percussive snap, as within the finger-picking rhythm hooks of “Slim Pickins” and “Sharpest Software.” The entire nation/synth-pop vibe evokes Madonna’s disco-cowgirl part in her Music period — one way or the other Ms. Ciccone’s “Don’t Inform Me” has grown into a significant pop touchstone for our second.
“Style” is a delectably vicious opener, as she tells her ex’s new woman, “You’ll simply must style me when he’s kissing you.” However the flip facet is “Coincidence,” the place the ex is again within the sport, as she sings, “Final week you didn’t have any doubts/This week you’re holding house for her tongue in your mouth.” Within the Eighties-style synth-fluffer “Mattress Chem,” she celebrates shameless lust to the purpose the place she will get downright Shakespearean, in her skill to rhyme “Come proper on me, I imply camaraderie” with “The place artwork thou? Why not uponeth me?”
Sabrina rips so many boys into so many shreds right here, however one in every of her funniest targets is the literary poseur in “Dumb & Poetic.” She sneers, “Attempt to come off such as you’re tender and well-spoken/Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” The late Montreal poet-sage would have been completely honored by this tribute, simply as he would loved Boygenius’ equally harsh “Leonard Cohen” final 12 months. Cohen beloved mocking male self-importance (together with his personal) the way in which these songwriters do, and he’d admire how Sabrina turns her romantic woes into barbs like “Save all of your breath to your ground meditation” and “I promise the mushrooms aren’t altering your life.” Additionally, they each have a aptitude for outlandish rhymes — someplace, Cohen might be kicking himself for not stretching out “Hallelujah” with “dream-come-true ya” and “Mountain Dew ya.”
“Don’t Smile” is the one dud, with a comically surly message — “don’t smile as a result of it occurred, child, cry as a result of it’s over” — however an excessive amount of droop within the execution. Carpenter simply has extra enjoyable singing about hatred than bummed-out defeat. One among her idols, Kacey Musgraves, not too long ago joined her onstage to duet on the Nancy Sinatra rage-queen traditional “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and it felt like a passing of the torch, as a result of that’s the spirit Sabrina goals for right here. On the vinyl version of Brief n’ Candy, Carpenter indicators off with “Useless to Say,” the place she makes enjoyable of her personal “entertaining early-twenties judgment.” But when it resulted in songs this nice, no person’s knocking her judgment in any respect.
