Sabrina Carpenter Short n’ Sweet review: She does one thing Taylor Swift can’t.

There are three certified plateaus of Sabrina Carpenter consciousness, according to most gurus of pop-girl-ology. If anyone in this cohort happened to hear that Carpenter’s album Short n’ Sweet was being released Friday, they would probably muse, “Hmm, wonder if the full-length debut will live up to those two singles?” Related From Slate We Officially Have a Major New Pop Star A subset of us, however, had already achieved degree two of Sabrinawareness: We heard about her in 2021 when Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” blew up, followed by the album Sour, and Carpenter was reputed to be the other woman in a tug-of-war over some hunk of boy whose betrayal fueled all of Rodrigo’s songs. That track record ought to relieve any doubt that Carpenter’s the one writing most of the sex jokes on Short n’ Sweet, like threatening on “Good Graces” that if a boyfriend doesn’t treat her well, “I’ll tell the world you finish your chores prematurely,” or pretty much every word of “Juno,” which, by way of the 2007 indie film about a knocked-up teen, uses its title as a synonym for pregnancy: “If you love me right, then who knows? She’s become ever more adept at eviscerating fuckbois—witness the bloody cadaver–strewn floor in the “Feather” video—like the one here who’s not the “Sharpest Tool” in the shed: “We had sex, I met your best friends/ Then a bird flies by and you forget.” Or the sensitive-posturing guy in the folkie-strummed “Dumb & Poetic”: “Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken/ Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” I’m not sure which is more devastating, that or “I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life.” Aside from the occasional good lay, Carpenter really makes it sound like an ordeal to be a young straight woman in 2024, “Since the good ones call their exes wasted/ And since the Lord forgot my gay awakenin’,” as she sings on the next track, “Slim Pickins.” The title there is also a nod to the prominent banjo line; it’s one of several songs here that lean a little country and would have fit in well on Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 Golden Hour, an album praised everywhere at the time that sometimes seems forgotten now. Not by Carpenter, who brought Musgraves up onstage in San Francisco this month to duet on “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” calling her “an artist that I’ve just loved for my entire life.” There’s also an acoustic cast to the penultimate track, “Lie to Girls”—which really should be the closer rather than the comparatively weak and sleepy “Don’t Smile.” It’s here that Carpenter really confronts her portion of the problem with the dud dudes, assuring one, in the midst of reaming him out for misbehavior, “You don’t have to lie to girls/ If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves” and then cleverly looping it back: “Like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” And, debate her as you will, she universalizes the issue to her whole gender: “It’s lucky for you I’m just like/ My mother / The girl outside the strip club, getting her tarot cards read.” Carpenter might be said to circle these subjects obsessively here, but, as in those examples, it’s always from fresh angles, and usually quite concisely.