PRINCESS OF POP

Ahead of Disney graduate Sabrina Carpenter's sixth album, Annabel Nugent chronicles how the singer's frothy and flirty tunes have amassed billions of streams

- Annabel Nugent

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 Oscarwinning 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