Jeremy Williams-Chalmers, Arts Correspondent

Albums: Sabrina Carpenter Short 'n Sweet

Sabrina Carpenter Short 'n Sweet

Taste; Please Please Please; Good Graces; Sharpest Tool; Coincidence; Bed Chem; Espresso; Dumb & Poetic; Slim Pickins; Juno; Lie To Girls; Don't Smile.

Label: Island


Sabrina Carpenter has had an enviable 2024. While the 25-year-old former Disney star enjoyed her first UK 'hit' single with Skin back in 2021, the focus at the time was more on the rumour mill surrounding her involvement in a love triangle featuring Joshua Bassett and Olivia Rodrigo, which allegedly inspired the phenomenal anthem Driver's License. A year later, she returned with the album she describes as the start of her creative journey, having not had a lot of creative input on her first four albums. Emails I Can't Send resonated with an audience in the UK and achieved a respectable charting of #41 for Sabrina. However, nobody could have predicted that on April 11, 2024, she would unleash Espresso, the song of 2024.

Having stormed to #1 on the charts, the pressure to deliver a strong follow-up was on, and with a video featuring her (now rumoured to be ex) boyfriend Barry Keoghan, the lush but slightly twisted Please Please Please ticked all the right boxes and achieved another #1 chart placing. Following such huge chart success applies the pressure, and can Sabrina deliver on her sixth studio album, Short 'n Sweet?

Short 'n Sweet is everything you'd expect it to be. It is sweetly delivered pop with a deliciously naughty bite. It is far from paint by number pop and actually really shakes up the formula that started to establish her as a household name internationally on the album Emails I Can't Send. In losing this formula, she ensures the record's hit potential.

While the album opener might have been selected as the next single, the rather lush simplicity of earworm Good Graces is very radio-ready (albeit once the lyrics have been given a radio makeover). Embracing an unexpected country twist on Slim Pickins is quite delightful, and she certainly saves the best for last on the slow burn Don't Smile.

Lyrically acute, the best line of the album is delivered on the epic coincidence, as Sabrina nonchalantly notes, 'Your car drove from LA to her thighs.' It is in these striking bites that Sabrina really shows her strengths. An actress at her core, her delivery is faultless.

Short 'n Sweet is very naughty, but nice in equal measure. Sabrina Carpenter needed to raise her own very high bar, and she more than manages.