Short n’ Sweet, the sixth studio album from Sabrina Carpenter, is still laying out in the sun in preparation for its late-summer release. The record will arrive on Aug. 23 bolstered by the relentless earworm singles “Espresso,” on which she works late because she’s a singer, and “Please Please Please,” on which she begs a man not to embarrass her because she’s too pretty to cry.
The two hit singles — both of which landed in the top three of the Billboard Hot 100 — are further proof of Carpenter’s expert understanding of what makes a great pop song sound and feel so good. She began laying this foundation first on her 2018 album Singular: Act I, then more explicitly on 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send. Short n’ Sweet sees the return of her “Nonsense” collaborator Julian Bunetta and brings her dream collaborator Jack Antonoff into the fold, too, with more to be revealed later.
Carpenter is throwing away any restrictive rulebooks around her creative process on Short n’ Sweet, leading with honesty that puts her personality on full display and embracing the shift in her emotional state she experienced while making this record in comparison to her last.
“This project is quite special to me and I hope it’ll be something special to you too,” Carpenter wrote on social media while simultaneously unveiling the album title, artwork, and release date earlier this month. Here’s everything we know about the record so far.
Short n’ Sweet features Sabrina’s most honest songwriting yet — and she isn’t holding back
Carpenter’s fifth studio album, 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, opened with a scathing title track about the irreversible impact infidelity has on trust and love. “Thanks to you, I, I can’t love right/I get nice guys and villainize them,” she sings. “Read their texts like they’re havin’ sex right now/Scared I’ll find out that it’s true/And if I do, then I blame you/For every worst that I assume.” It’s a raw opening to an album that makes as much space for the singer’s river of tears as it did for her wildest pop star fantasies.
With Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter is continuing to embrace this balance with the most honest songwriting of her career. “I hope they find whatever they need to guide them through their life through my mistakes,” Carpenter tells Rolling Stone about recounting her life experiences in music for her audience. “Because I think the more open I am with my experiences, the more that other people are like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s OK that that happened to me. It’s not the end of the world.’”
Carpenter experienced a complete emotional shift while making Short n’ Sweet
In 2022, Carpenter was hyper-focused on holding herself together as she prepared to release Emails I Can’t Send. Though this was her fifth studio album, there were so many more eyes on her this time around — some supportive and eager to see her succeed, but also others deeply doubtful about her abilities and rooting for her to fail for the sake of perpetuating the narrative of drama surrounding the album’s release.
“So many people probably have dealt with the situation of being labeled something that they’re not,” she told Rolling Stone at the time. “And it’s frustrating because you want to do something about it. But then if you do something, people are mad; if you don’t do something, people are mad.”
Heading into Short n’ Sweet, the amount of visibility Carpenter is experiencing has grown tenfold. “Espresso” has become the biggest hit of her career and what feels like the pop event of the year. And it’s follow-up, “Please Please Please,” is hot on its heels. It’s a different kind of attention, and this contrast is reflected in the musician’s emotional state. She tells Rolling Stone that the most significant difference between her current life and when she released Emails I Can’t Send is that “I cried every day then. I don’t cry every day now.”
The singer isn’t putting an expiration date on her music
Great pop songs often have an enduring shelf-life that allows them to survive the test of time. With Emails I Can’t Send, “Nonsense” and “Feather” weren’t immediate hits, but slow-burning singles that eventually broke through and made it onto Carpenter’s Saturday Night Live set list alongside the more instant “Espresso.” Now, as Short n’ Sweet‘s lead singles introduce more of the general public to the singer’s discography, songs from her earlier albums such as Singular: Act 1 and Evolution are seeing resurgences on TikTok.
Carpenter has her sights set on the future as she moves into the Short n’ Sweet era, but she doesn’t want to assign an expiration date to the music she creates. Even if she has grown from certain emotions she encapsulated on her songs, she’s resisting the urge to overthink them or make significant changes to reflect where she currently is.
“I think every artist is like that,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I figure music is in seasons and the project should dictate a specific time. Just because I might’ve written a song a year ago and I don’t feel that way anymore, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong on a project.”
Jack Antonoff, one of Sabrina’s dream collaborators, worked on half of Short n’ Sweet
Even before Carpenter was brought into Taylor Swift’s pop orbit both as a friend and on the Eras Tour, she was a massive fan of an essential friend and collaborator in that world: Jack Antonoff. The pair met outside of a comedy club in New York a few years ago and the singer was “peeing my pants because I wanted to work with him for my whole life.” Soon enough, they were friends, too. And one of Antonoff’s favorite places to hang with friends is at the studio.
“It was only a matter of time,” Carpenter tells Rolling Stone. “He heard some of the stuff that I was working on for this album, and we just started to make magic.” Antonoff worked with Carpenter on “Please Please Please,” adding: “She’s becoming one of the biggest young pop stars, and that song is such a statement of expressing yourself, not just lyrically, but sonically.” The producer worked on about half of the album over the course of the past year, a process that encompassed “some of the best days of my life,” Carpenter says.
Short n’ Sweet is concise and collaborative
Apart from Jack Antonoff, the only other revealed collaborator on Short n’ Sweet thus far — on the production front — is Julian Bunetta, who helmed “Espresso.” Carpenter and Bunetta first collaborated while making Emails I Can’t Send, teaming up on “Nonsense” and “Bet U Wanna.”
The two producers approach pop with distinctly different styles, but then again so does Carpenter. The singer credits Emails I Can’t Send with unlocking her ability to move between genres, from folk-pop and alt-pop to electro-pop and sticky-sweet pure pop, all of which she continues to explore on the upcoming record.
Carpenter found that Short n’ Sweet still maintains a sense of cohesion despite the range of sounds and collaborators present across its track list. “At first, I was wondering if it was separate projects or if it felt like one,” she says, referencing the batch of songs she made with Antonoff. “And then, as everything came together, I was like, ‘This is one album.’”