Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” serves up a summer soundtrack of sugary beats and sharp-tongued lyrics, but beneath the catchy exterior lies a bitter aftertaste that challenges the playful pop persona she’s built.

For a great many, the sound of summer has been defined by the spritely, sex-positive, devil-may-care attitude and aesthetic of pop music artists like Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Camilla Cabello. It is a soundscape exemplified by hedonism in the face of socio-cultural adversity and a brilliant generational moment captured essentially by the phrase brat summer, all while decorated with wired headphones, Y2K lip gloss, and sunglasses. “I’m gonna dance all night”, Charlie xcx sings in her nostalgic club-pop anthem, Club classics, “never gonna stop ’til the morning light”. Now, in the season’s denouement, Sabrina Carpenter shares her own summer score with the album Short n’ Sweet.

Short n’ Sweet is Carpenter’s sixth album, following the well-celebrated emails i can’t send and the festive drop, fruitcake. Launching on the back of instant-hit singles Espresso and Please Please Please, it also asserts itself as a shifted character, or vibe, among Carpenter’s music, being an album that stands outdoors, in the sunshine, and celebrates, unlike much of Carpenter’s formative releases that, by contrast, revelled in introverted bedroom-pop and, inescapably, Disney-friendly aesthetics.

During the press tour of Short n’ Sweet’s release, Carpenter often refers to the inspirations of her own life, choosing to write songs that are “blunt” and “very forward”, descriptors that fit with the generational attitude of brattish behaviour and propensity for a vocal confidence in the explicit. Carpenter’s tracks are distinctly direct. In the track Please Please Please, she asks her romantic partner not to embarrass her with outlandish behaviour, a transparent reference to the celebrity ill-behaviour of her then-partner Barry Keoghan, with additional and repeated reprimand of him being a ‘motherfucker’. The tracks are also explicit, and densely intimate, from the description of making paintings with a tongue to screaming “I’m so fucking horny.”

When I first considered the album’s concept, I was all for it. Generational wealth is being throttled but we can still have some fun, soundtracked by carefree and upbeat pop. And stars empowering listeners, especially women, to feel better able to talk about sex and physical pleasure openly is a good thing. If Chappell Roan’s reference to a wand and a rabbit in Red Wine Supernova helps even slightly to breakdown the still-pervasive shame of female masturbation, then we’re moving in the right direction (as I’m sure Hitachi would agree). However, when I actually listened to Short n’ Sweet, I quickly began to realise that Carpenter isn’t setting a wholly positive example for others. The spritzed, sultry glamour and bubbly escapism of her music has a sourness. I would even be inclined to say that her self-described blunt and forward workings are actually quite venomous.

The album’s opener, Taste, is an immediate and ideal example. The big drums and shimmered strums of its music carry a rather unpleasant message to an ex-lover’s ex-partner that, even though they’re now back together, each intimacy will be a reminder of Carpenter’s physical taste. Then there is Good Graces, opening with the assertion that “I don’t give a fuck about you” before stating that, when it comes to Carpenter, “no one is more amazing at turning love into hatred”. And, of course, there’s the growingly notorious line from Lie To Girls that tells “I can make a shit show look a whole lot more like forever.”

What’s more, when I started to scrutinise the lyrics further, I realised that Carpenter spends much of the album discussing, admonishing, or fantasying about other people. I would argue that Slim Pickins is the only track that Carpenter takes the time to look at herself predominantly over others, and even then she only takes to muse inwardly because she is stricken by the absence of a quality partner. It’s a point of curiosity that makes me think of the old phrase, if you smell shit everywhere you go - perhaps you need to look under your shoe. I actually discussed this interpretation of Short n’ Sweet, as a Millennial male, with some Gen Z female friends to see how much context or understanding I might be missing. 

“I think Sabrina Carpenter is actually quite mean,” I said to one friend.

“That’s the tea,” she responded.

Perhaps this is the point. Short n’ Sweet is an album of makeups and breakups. Carpenter has taken to interrupt and share her dating experiences and capture the frustration of being humiliated, hurt, or unsatisfied. Perhaps being blunt and very forward is overdue. Perhaps Keoghan does deserve to be called a motherfucker. And, it should be said that despite the often negative narrative of songs, there is a great deal of humour to be found, albeit often at the expense of others, with some lines being endearingly simple (“Switch it up like Nintendo”) or so-insultingly hamfisted (“Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”) that absurdity prevails and one can’t help but smile. 

Even giving the album this grace, however, it’s impossible to ignore that the music is a buckshot selection of surface-level genre interpretations, those which would not feel out of place as the default compositions of an electronic keyboard’s preset beats. Dumb & Poetic is a strummed acoustic ballad, Slim Pickins embraces the rural American twang, while Good Graces throws back to 90s R’n’B. Perhaps it’s my own cynicism but I can’t help feeling it’s a way of hedging bets, ensuring that there’s music suited every listener (or social media dance), which suggests Carpenter is less able to offer personality than the more assertive artistic voice of xcx’s BRAT. 

This is, ultimately, a shame because Carpenter has an undeniably wonderful voice. When it’s allowed to shine, such as it does on Lie To Girls, it elevates the quality of the entire project. Espresso has such a brilliant breathy cool while Taste has inescapably catchy harmonies. Even the strikingly weird Coincidence, a track that attempts to paint the image of Carpenter singing over an indifferent crowd at a local bar, momentarily glows when it sheds the folksy pretence and gives her the room to rise. 

Regardless, the brightest moments of Short n’ Sweet are, too heavily marred by the overall lacklustre compositions and spiteful culture of its own lyrics. It could be that I’m missing the tea, or that the title Short n’ Sweet is a deliberately ironic interpretation of Shallow n’ Sour and hers is a truth about being brattish that I’ve entirely missed. But, no matter how brilliant Espresso is (and I do believe it’s a fantastic summer anthem), Carpenter’s latest album seems a reminder to check the quality of our snack foods - because they can sometimes be deceptively rancid.