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Midcentury sex symbol Brigitte Bardot’s persona has been recently resurrected in mainstream pop, with songs like Olivia Rodrigo’s “lacy” and Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” name-dropping her directly. But perhaps the genre’s most overt invocation of Bardot’s coquette aesthetic and fluffy blond blowout belongs to Sabrina Carpenter, the five-foot-nothing former Disney Channel star turned pop charts powerhouse with the Aug. 23 release of her new album, “Short n’ Sweet.”
Since dropping the studio album “Emails I Can’t Send” in 2022, Carpenter has refined her musical persona into something slyer, sharper and more unrepentant. Compared to “Emails I Can’t Send,” the tracks on “Short n’ Sweet” are less personal, more self-assured and significantly catchier, delighting pop enthusiasts everywhere.
Nowhere is that more true than on “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” two singles released ahead of the album that both rocketed their way to the top of the Billboard Global 200 chart. I’ll spare you any analysis of “Espresso,” the airy vocals of which are almost certain to have already wormed their way into your ears and lodged themselves deep in your brain, in favor of “Please Please Please,” my personal favorite of the two.
“Please Please Please” carves out its own niche among the crowded genre of love songs: neither an ode to nor an indictment of the singer’s lover, it instead functions as a very public warning not to screw up. For those who missed lines like “I know that you’re an actor, so act like a stand-up guy,” Carpenter banishes any ambiguity by enlisting her real-life boyfriend, “Saltburn” star Barry Keoghan, for the music video. The sweetly pointed lyrics are paired with a gorgeous key change that makes the song an album highlight.
Speaking of star-studded music videos, the one for the album’s opening track, “Taste,” recruits scream queen Jenna Ortega for slapstick, gory fun. In it, Carpenter addresses an ex’s new girlfriend, or rather a reignited old flame, to boast about the impression she had left on him. Though the song may give off the impression that Carpenter is nostalgic, the music video nimbly subverts that expectation, with Carpenter and Ortega gleefully trying to murder each other in increasingly creative ways but reconciling at the end after realizing their shared partner wasn’t worth all that.
Other tracks are more vindictive, with “Sharpest Tool,” “Coincidence” and “Slim Pickins,” in particular brimming with sarcastic indictments of the modern dating landscape for heterosexual women. The men Carpenter describes are all varying degrees of unfaithful, asinine or uncommunicative, but she resigns herself to settling for them “Since the good ones call their exes wasted / And since the Lord forgot my gay awakening.”
Though it’s used to skewer a pretentious ex-lover, the title of the eighth track, “Dumb and Poetic,” might as well be the album title. That isn’t a dig — Carpenter’s ex may wrap his stupidity in intellectualism, but her lyricism does the opposite. Lines like “I know I Mountain Dew it for you” on “Espresso,” the oxymoronic “I’m stupid but I’m clever” on “Lie to Girls” and the faux-Shakespearean “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” on “Bed Chem” establish Carpenter as a connoisseur of playful word salad, not unlike her famous “Nonsense” outros.
The album is also unabashedly sex-positive, resulting in such on-the-nose lines as “I’m so fuckin’ horny” and “I might let you make me Juno,” in reference to the 2007 teen pregnancy comedy. But for all its risqué humor, “Short n’ Sweet” doesn’t take many actual risks.
It’s by no means necessary for all pop music to push the boundaries of the genre, but there is something that feels distinctly safe about the musical and lyrical stylings of “Short n’ Sweet.” (Personally, I lack confidence in producer Jack Antonoff, who also had a heavy hand in the muddled slog that was Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”)
Regardless of the relative lack of risk-taking, Carpenter deserves credit for what she’s managed to accomplish here: a bright, mischievous crowd-pleaser of an album that solidifies her artistic voice and leaves little doubt that she’s a force to be reckoned with in the genre.
In “Bad for Business,” the second to last song on “Emails I Can’t Send,” Carpenter wonders “If I’m just writing happy songs / Will anybody sing along?” Looking at the chart-topping success of “Short n’ Sweet,” the answer appears to be a wholehearted yes.