Sabrina Carpenter: How the Espresso singer rode frothy, flirty fun to Gen Z pop stardom

The singer’s two latest singles have amassed more than 1.6 billion streams between them. Ahead of the release of Sabrina Carpenter’s hugely anticipated sixth album, Annabel Nugent chronicles her decades-long ride to the top from Disney alum to Gen Z pop star

The Pennsylvania-born artist is finally reaping the rewards of a decades-long slow burn (Getty/iStock)

At least once a week, any given lyric by the 25-year-old pop star Sabrina Carpenter will flood my brain like an intrusive thought. Take the nu-disco neologism of “Espresso” (“That’s that me espresso”) or any one of the woozy entreaties of “Please Please Please”. Her songs are earworms, the lot of them – and in a few days time, there will be plenty more Karaoke fodder thanks to the release of her new album, Short n’ Sweet.

Although you and everyone you know probably heard “Espresso” on repeat this summer, it’s telling that the caffeinated bop isn’t even Carpenter’s biggest hit. That accolade belongs to “Please Please Please”, the winking, country-inflected number that scored Carpenter her first No 1 back in June, bolstered by the release of a music video featuring her Oscar-winning beau Barry Keoghan. (Rumours of their split are unlikely to dampen the fanfare surrounding her album’s arrival.) A month later, Carpenter broke records in the UK to become the first female artist to hold the top two positions on the singles chart for three consecutive weeks.

Both tracks, which were recently featured on TikTok’s Top 10 songs of the summer, are singles off her new record, which is out this Friday and has a good chance of becoming the pop album of 2024. It’s funny to recall how only last year Carpenter was deemed a member of “pop’s middle class” in The New York Times; now, she’s royalty. So prodigious has this year been for her that it’s easy to mistake Carpenter for a newcomer. In reality, Short n’ Sweet will be her sixth album. There has been a smattering of hits along the way, including the bubblegum rush of “Nonsense” and “Feather” last year, but nothing as big as this moment right now.

It could be argued, in fact, that Carpenter is the moment right now – or at least part of it. Alongside Brat star Charli XCX and Midwest princess Chappell Roan, the Pennsylvania-born artist is finally reaping the rewards of a decades-long slow burn. It’s no coincidence that she’s found her biggest crowd with her most effervescent hits; they are irresistible in their sweetness. In her music and on stage, Carpenter is self-consciously saccharine – the human embodiment of a macaron dipped in chocolate. Her lyrics, too, tend to telegraph an enviable confidence that feels empowering to try and imitate, if only for two-and-a-half minutes.

Cheeky innuendos have become part and parcel of Carpenter’s lingua franca (Getty)

Again, she has been at this for a while – and success was a long time coming. Carpenter released her first album when she was 15 years old under Disney’s Hollywood Records label at the same time as she was starring as the BFF in the tween sitcom Girl Meets World. “I’m 900 inappropriate jokes away from being a Disney actor, but people still see me that way,” she said in a recent interview.

Cheeky innuendos have become part and parcel of Carpenter’s lingua franca. Online, you’ll find thousands of videos dedicated to her live outros for her flirty single “Nonsense” – a verse that changes depending on the city she’s in and slides on the rudeness scale between X-rated explicit and seductively arch. Earlier this summer, appearing on stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in sky-high pink platforms, Carpenter leapt over the broadcaster’s requests to keep things kid-friendly. “BBC said I should keep it PG/ BBC, I wish I had it in me. There’s a double meaning if you dig deep,” she teased, blowing a kiss to the crowd.

Carpenter’s music is absurdly fun to sing along to, not only because the words themselves are capable of eliciting a grin in the most serious of listeners, but also thanks to how she sings them. She has a knack for interesting enunciation, as on “Please Please Please” when she swoops down from her angelic falsetto to a jilted grumble. “The little vocal runs she does are so bizarre and unique – they’re doing this really odd, classic, almost yodel-y country thing,” said pop savant Jack Antonoff, who worked on about half of Short n’ Sweet with her. “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.”

Carpenter’s ascent was caught up with that of another “big young pop star”. In 2021, Carpenter made headlines as the “blonde girl” referenced disparagingly on Olivia Rodrigo’s smash-hit kiss-off “Drivers License”. (Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, Joshua Bassett, also a Disney star, allegedly left her for Carpenter in 2020.) In response, Carpenter wrote a hit of her own: “Now I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut/ I got death threats fillin’ up semi-trucks,” she sang on “Because I Liked a Boy” from her lovingly crafted, coming-of-age album Emails I Can’t Send in 2022.

Carpenter released her first album when she was 15 years old under Disney’s Hollywood Records label (AP)

Neither musician has ever confirmed the stories, but the rumour mill did its thing regardless, and the idea of a torrid Disney love triangle no doubt helped to introduce Carpenter into the mainstream. When the tabloids lost interest in the gossip, people stayed for the music. Emails I Can’t Send became her highest-charting LP to date, reaching No 23 on the Billboard albums chart.

For the past 10 years, pop as a genre has been dominated by the hushed tones of bedroom pop, known for its emotionally excavating lyrics and sparse instrumentation. Think Clairo, Beabadoobee, and Holly Humberstone. By contrast, Carpenter’s music demands a stage, loudspeakers – and preferably, a loud crowd. Her brazen lyrics and amped-up energy blew the hinges off the bedroom pop door, letting in a gust of sweetly perfumed pop music with a capital P. That grandiosity is backed up by a gift for exuberant performances; ever the Disney star, Carpenter is a consummate professional on stage – executing precise choreography in teetering high heels while delighting crowds with a flick of her perfect blonde blowout and off-the-cuff banter.

Admittedly, unlike bedroom pop, there is nothing particularly poignant about a lyric like “I know I Mountain Dew it for ya” – and Carpenter herself has previously expressed feeling insecure about pop music’s ability to connect with people, as frothy as it is. She was initially reluctant to include “Nonsense” on Emails I Can’t Send out of fear that her raunchy ode to horniness would detract from the more serious matters she explores on the record, including the slut-shaming she faced as well as her dad’s past infidelity.

Sabrina Carpenter performs during New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York City (Reuters)

Carpenter has since come to understand the validity of both these facets of herself. “Those real moments where I’m just a 25-year-old girl who’s super horny are as real as when I’m going through a heartbreak and I’m miserable and I don’t feel like a person,” she told Rolling Stone in June this year. You only have to look at the crowd of any Sabrina Carpenter concert for proof of pop music’s ability to connect.

As for her new album, it’s hard to overstate just how high expectations are. When you come out of the gate swinging with hits like “Espresso”, the third-fastest song to reach a billion streams on Spotify, where do you go from there? Carpenter has kept schtum for the most part about what fans can expect but has let slip that the album takes inspiration from Nineties pop.

She’s also said that she’s looking to expand on the genre-hopping of her last album – which skipped between folk-pop, alt-pop, and electro-pop. Whatever it is, please – please, please – let the album live up to the hype.