All 36 minutes and 12 seconds of Short n’ Sweet are officially here. On Friday, Sabrina Carpenter released her sixth album after months of anticipation that followed her viral hits “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.“
“I feel a thread running through this album of not just self-discovery, but also getting through the heartache and heartbreak that can often … Man, it can really break you for a long time,” she told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 Thursday. “And I get the feeling, even with the humor and with a healthy dose of judgement in some of these songs, that you were hurting real bad.”
The new album features a total of 12 tracks, including “Taste,” “Good Graces,” and “Coincidence,” which brought Carpenter to the writing room with Amy Allen and Julia Michaels. She told Rolling Stone in June that the album would feature some of her most honest songwriting.
“I hope they find whatever they need to guide them through their life through my mistakes,” Carpenter said 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.’”
Along with Michaels and Allen, Carpenter tapped Jack Antonoff, who produced “Please Please Please,” for songs “Lie to Girls,” “Slim Pickins” and “Sharpest Tools.” The pair met outside of a comedy club in New York a few years ago and Carpenter said she “wanted to work with him for my whole life.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Carpenter said of Antonoff to Rolling Stone. “He heard some of the stuff that I was working on for this album, and we just started to make magic.”
Carpenter launched Short n’ Sweet with “Espresso” on April 11, just a handful of days before her performance at Coachella. She debuted the song during the festival, which arrived as she found a larger audience thanks to her silly live outros for Emails I Can’t Send‘s “Nonsense” and opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour in Latin America.
Fans of Carpenter will get to hear an additional 13th track from Short ‘n Sweet, titled “Needless to Say,” on a special, limited edition version of the album only available on vinyl.
Carpenter first announced the album in early June, calling the album “quite special to me.” Several weeks later, she revealed that she’ll bring the LP on the road with a tour in North America starting in late September. Short ‘n Sweet marks Carpenter’s sixth album, following 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, 2019’s Singular: Act II, 2018’s Singular: Act I, 2016’s Evolution, and 2015’s Eyes Wide Open. However, she told Variety that she considers Short n’ Sweet her second “big girl” album and the “hot older sister” of Emails I Can’t Send.
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