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This confident, peppy debut from Girl Meets World’s Sabrina Carpenter lays out the Disney star’s sweetly tart voice atop gentle pop production and upbeat acoustic strum. The best moments come when the teen allows a glimpse of her old soul, keeping her cool amidst a maelstrom of big feelings. The luminous, defiant “Two Young Hearts” and the longing “Too Young” find her grappling with the romantic limitations of adolescence, while the lighter touch of ukulele-flecked tracks such as “Darling I’m a Mess” buffers her vulnerability with playful charm.

The Disney star steps forward with a set of chic songs.

In the time since Sabrina Carpenter released her last album, 2016’s EVOLution, she’s toured with The Vamps and New Hope Club, released songs with Lost Kings and Jonas Blue, and acted in film and TV projects including George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give. Somehow, in the midst of all that, she recorded a third album—the two-part project Singular—which begins here with a serving of saucy, confident dance-pop. Each song feels like a dramatic episode from her own fabulous life: She jet-sets between romances (“Paris”), sasses an ex (“Bad Time”), and boldly asserts her worth (“Diamonds Are Forever”)—but she doesn’t dwell. Instead, she keeps the focus on her own happiness and self-worth. “Feeling myself can’t be illegal,” she coos on the EDM-lite breakup anthem “Sue Me,” which is delightfully devoid of self-consciousness (“I guess I’m hard to ignore/Pick up that jaw off the floor”). She congratulates herself for dressing up, going out, and moving on—and challenges anyone to try and stop her.

More infectious R&B-pop earworms from the actress and singer-songwriter.

The pop star adds more bold, no-nonsense tales to her fifth album.

Five sweet and tart holiday originals, plus a twist on “White Christmas.”

有些人会选择与敌人一笑泯恩仇，而在 2024 年大放异彩的流行明星 Sabrina Carpenter 则反其道而行，她在轻盈的旋律、顽皮的笑容里，用毒舌金句狠狠吐槽一无是处的前任。曾经身为迪士尼频道童星的她，在 2014 年以首支单曲《Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying》开启了音乐事业，那年她 15 岁。十年过去了，25 岁的她在全世界的瞩目下，创作着她个人迄今最悦耳、最幽默，也最真诚的音乐。在《Please Please Please》里，她表面上恳求男友不要再次让她难堪，实则也嘲笑了自己。她告诉 Apple Music：“我喜欢这张专辑里对自己负责的态度。我不但会吐槽别人，也会吐槽自己。”

Carpenter 表示，把第六张专辑命名为《Short n’ Sweet》，并不是在开身高的玩笑，她解释道：“我想起一些过去的感情，有些交往时间很短的关系，影响却最深。我也反思了自己在各种境遇下的反应，有时很温和，有时却糟糕透顶。”但这张专辑并不困顿于省思的苦涩，反而充满戏谑和幽默。Carpenter 用生活的荒诞解构了悲伤。“生活到了这一步，你已一筹莫展、无计可施，于是一切看起来都变得很好笑。”Carpenter 坦言，“专辑很多歌曲都诞生于让我捧腹大笑的时刻。我想，好啊，不如就把它写成歌吧。”《Dumb & Poetic》是一首温柔的不插电抒情歌，却整篇弥漫着淡淡的嘲讽，Carpenter 在其中揭穿了一个用花言巧语和高雅品味掩饰龌龊念头的家伙。而在令人忍俊不禁的《Slim Pickins》里，她幽默地唱着：“天呐，这个女孩该怎么办？/这小子连 there、their、they are 都分不清/而他在我的房间里脱光了衣服”（Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room）。”

Carpenter 在法国乡下的一个小镇住了 11 天，期间创作了专辑中的不少歌曲。独处让她更加真实地面对自己、写出了前所未有的真挚之作，也包括一首红到让她不知所以然的《Espresso》，里面一句莫名其妙却琅琅上口的歌词“That’s that me espresso”让她的事业一飞冲天。在谈到创作过程时，她回忆道：“写歌词其实没什么规则。我只是问自己：怎么唱会听起来很棒？什么感觉最好？怎么去表达我想说的故事？”不过，这首歌也让她在世界各地的咖啡店点餐时遇到了一点麻烦。“他们都等我说那句歌词。”她大笑道，“但我偏要说：‘给我来杯茶。’”

Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.”

It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album Short n’ Sweet. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.”

With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.”

Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”

Sabrina Carpenter spent the decade after her debut single, 2014’s “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying,” patiently finding her voice. Her persistence finally paid off in 2024, when the absurdly catchy singles “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please” launched the former child star into a whole new realm of pop stardom. Her sixth album, August 2024’s Short n’ Sweet, reintroduced the pint-sized singer as a sharp-witted diva with a honeyed voice and a fondness for campy innuendo—and earned Carpenter her first two Grammys (Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Solo Performance).

Just over a year after Short n’ Sweet’s release, the biggest breakout pop star of 2024 fires off its follow-up, Man’s Best Friend, which carries on her streak of concise 12-track records that draw from her love of ’70s disco and ooze snarky, self-deprecating charisma. “Oh, boy,” Carpenter chuckles to begin lead single “Manchild,” which taps the usual co-writers (Jack Antonoff and Amy Allen) for a country-tinged ode to the incompetent, unavailable men she can’t seem to shake.

Romantic disappointment prevails, though the 26-year-old maintains her sense of humor as she wishes an ex a lifetime of celibacy on “Never Getting Laid” and drunk-dials old flames on the twangy “Go Go Juice.” Steeped in the nostalgic sounds of her heroes (Dolly Parton, the Carpenters, ABBA, the Bee Gees), Carpenter’s lyrics approach the drudgery of modern dating with a wink and a well-timed dirty joke. “I promise none of this is a metaphor,” she sings on the New Jack Swing-inspired “House Tour,” then she carries on: “I just want you to come inside.”