In an age of Taylor Swifts, Lana Del Reys and Chappell Roans, what is the role of a manufactured pop star? When we have at our fingertips a whole world of artfully crafted yet still catchy and relatable music by the songwriting geniuses of our time, is there still room for the industrialized star that we usually associate with the single-shift hustle of the early 2000s?
If the recent, sudden success of 25-year-old Disney Channel alumna Sabrina Carpenter is anything to go by, it’s clear that in 2024 there’s plenty of appetite for such characters. It is also clear that their cultural purpose is good old fashioned idol worship. Carpenter has been around since 2016, but since her single “Espresso” became the song of the summer, she’s become a superstar. Its clever, catchy chorus has been inescapable since its release in April of this year, and Carpenter has become a household name. In addition to supporting Swift on her “Eras” tour in the U.S. last year, she’s playing London’s O2 Arena in March — and crowds are flocking not just for the dull tones of “Espresso” or for Carpenter’s angelic voice, but for her vibe: Britney -meets-Marilyn-Monroe-meets-Ariana-Grande.
For this summer, Carpenter has become an icon for the sake of being an icon. Unlike her Disney contemporary and rumored former love rival Olivia Rodrigo, who broke out a few years ago with the overrated but commendably emotional SadCarpenter is not a purveyor of adolescent angst. Rather, her core message seems to be that nothing is that deep. She serves rizz, confidence and calm, a relentless nymph who is really good at mixing her eyeshadow. She’s boy crazy, but with a GSOH – this personality was the fuel for “Espresso”, lush with creamsexualized and blow-dried, impossibly catchy and peppered with silly and screaming lyrics like “I’m working late, cos I’m a singerrrr”. Carpenter is apparently refreshing because she doesn’t take life or herself too seriously.
The good news for anyone who’s had the beachy grooves of “Espresso” swirling their nerves for months is that the rest of her debut album is—oh, sweet relief! – completely forgettable. What Carpenter possesses in luscious aesthetics, she lacks in musical integrity; there’s only so far being a sexy baby can get you, and while Short and sweet providing a good dose of her effortless soprano run and a heady whiff of saccharinity (like her signature perfume Sweet Tooth, the bottle of which is shaped like a baby-pink chocolate bar), it seems to have almost no organic essence or interesting musical ideas.
Carpenter tries to compensate for this by describing as many different kinds of men as possible, to cast his net of relatability wide. There are men her friends don’t approve of, men who cheat, men who don’t communicate, men who think they’re empaths, men who take magic mushrooms, men who don’t know where her clitoris is. To keep things empowering, she seems to come out, ahem, on top in every situation, either through outright seduction (“it’s me, espresso,”) or via sassy zingers — “Your car drove itself LA to her thighs” — showing us, if not them, who’s boss. Among the raw and insecure laments of Swift et al., her effortless confidence and sassy nonchalance is invigorating — but just as much, the peppy attitude can quickly become exhausting. .
Sex is the unifying factor on a record that otherwise consists of a set of slick singles that can be further pared down to snappy verses, snappy lines and snappy spoken asides to accompany snappy “Get Ready With Me” videos. (To be fair, Carpenter tempers expectations with the album’s title and its opening line, “Oh, I leave quite an impression / Five feet to be exact”: meta ways of telling us that this 12-song album will be nothing more than 35 minutes long.)
If the first five tracks of mindless cooing don’t get the creepy vibes across, don’t play “Bed Chem” in the car with your mom: “Come on me / I mean camaraderie,” she sings. Her state of ecstasy is such that we can’t hear any of the words in the chorus, but she gets to enough in the verses that an Easter egg about her rumored-to-be-ex-boyfriend, Irish actor Barry Keoghan, comes through (” Who is the cute boy with the white jacket and the thick accent?”).
Meanwhile, on “Juno,” a synthy, midtempo pop-bop that, with its teenage pregnancy references toned down, could be sung by Princess Meg from HerculesCarpenter floats around under odd compliments (“God bless your father’s genetics”), Bond-girl power plays (“You make me wanna make you fall in love”) and honeyed riffs until she lands right on point: “I’m so goddamn horny”. Sure.
All of this would be great if it weren’t for the fact that each song seems to try on a different musical genre to see what makes Carpenter most “iconic” – a versatility that leaves us unmoored and confused. There are moments on “Please Please Please” that feel like doing a shot of straight Lana Del Rey (“I’m asking you not to bother me, morf**ker”), and then Carpenter turns to the full-on slow-jam Noughties R&B from “Good Graces”, where she runs up and down in a soprano like Grande (obviously her vocal inspiration), then she goes indie on “Sharpest Tool” (arguably the standout behind “Espresso”) with a minimal, pulsing acoustic background, before she channels Joni Mitchell via metallic guitar and whimsical riffs on “Coincidence.” If that’s not enough to give you whiplash, by the end of the album we’re also treated to a decent amount of The Ronettes-via-Meghan-Trainor vocal harmony and , bizarrely, a Dolly Parton-esque, postmodern country song, “Slim Pickins,” in which she laments over bittersweet banjo “these douchebags in my phone” and her challenging quest to find a boy who’s “both jacked and kind.”
Through it all, we come out remembering only the hazy calypso from “Espresso” – but if Carpenter wants to show us that life is fun and games, he’s succeeded. “Heartbreak is one thing/ My ego’s another”, she winks on “Please Please Please”, before pleading with her unpredictable lover: “Don’t bring me to tears / When I’ve just done my make-up so beautifully”. These lines are microcosms of an album heavy on one-liners and thick with deluxe production, but starved of emotion, identity or consistency – and they also conveniently capture the 21Stcentury appeal of our surface-level summery queen.