Sabrina Carpenter Is Sly and Merciless on ‘Short n’ Sweet’

In Sabrina Carpenter’s songs, young romance is all sexy fun and games — until it’s not. “Short n’ Sweet,” her sixth full-length album, is a smart, funny, cheerfully merciless catalog of bad boyfriend behavior and the deceptions and rationalizations that enable it. Carpenter mostly smiles and winks her way through songs that recognize the irrational power of lust, but deftly twist the knife on cheaters and hypocrites. “No one’s more amazing at turning loving into hatred,” she warns in “Good Graces.”

Carpenter, 25, has triumphed in a career path that doesn’t always work out: spending her teens in show business. A contest entry for “The Next Miley Cyrus Project,” in 2011, led to Carpenter joining the Disney entertainment empire: signing to Disney’s Hollywood Records and gaining recognition with acting roles on the Disney Channel series “Girl Meets World” and in movies. Her Hollywood albums tried on teen-pop styles with middling results, gradually easing toward more adult material.

But she gained full artistic control with a new label, Island, and her 2022 album, “Emails I Can’t Send,” made the leap into her grown-up persona: equal parts playful, vulnerable, amorous and calculating. The album mixed post-breakup plaints with flirtations like the hit “Nonsense,” a song about overpowering attraction that’s also about songwriting: “Woke up this morning, thought I’d write a pop hit,” she lilts.

It also included “Because I Liked a Boy,” a ballad that seemingly addressed a celebrity romantic tangle and promoted everyone involved. Was Carpenter the “blond girl” who captured the ex-boyfriend that Olivia Rodrigo sang about in “Drivers License”? The internet thought so. “Now I’m a home wrecker, I’m a slut/I got death threats filling up semi trucks,” Carpenter sang, adding, “When everything went down we’d already broken up.”

“Short n’ Sweet” arrives powered by two ubiquitous summer hits. One is “Espresso,” a retro disco-pop groove carrying the boast of a confident hottie: “He looks so good wrapped around my finger,” she coos. The other, “Please Please Please,” begs an unstable boyfriend not to embarrass her in public. “Whatever devil’s inside you, don’t let him out tonight,” she admonishes, then sings “Please, please, please, don’t prove I’m right,” in the sugariest of harmonies.