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This confident, peppy debut from Girl Meets World’s Sabrina Carpenter lays out the Disney star’s sweetly tart voice atop gentle pop production and upbeat acoustic strum. The best moments come when the teen allows a glimpse of her old soul, keeping her cool amidst a maelstrom of big feelings. The luminous, defiant “Two Young Hearts” and the longing “Too Young” find her grappling with the romantic limitations of adolescence, while the lighter touch of ukulele-flecked tracks such as “Darling I’m a Mess” buffers her vulnerability with playful charm.

The Disney star steps forward with a set of chic songs.

In the time since Sabrina Carpenter released her last album, 2016’s EVOLution, she’s toured with The Vamps and New Hope Club, released songs with Lost Kings and Jonas Blue, and acted in film and TV projects including George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give. Somehow, in the midst of all that, she recorded a third album—the two-part project Singular—which begins here with a serving of saucy, confident dance-pop. Each song feels like a dramatic episode from her own fabulous life: She jet-sets between romances (“Paris”), sasses an ex (“Bad Time”), and boldly asserts her worth (“Diamonds Are Forever”)—but she doesn’t dwell. Instead, she keeps the focus on her own happiness and self-worth. “Feeling myself can’t be illegal,” she coos on the EDM-lite breakup anthem “Sue Me,” which is delightfully devoid of self-consciousness (“I guess I’m hard to ignore/Pick up that jaw off the floor”). She congratulates herself for dressing up, going out, and moving on—and challenges anyone to try and stop her.

More infectious R&B-pop earworms from the actress and singer-songwriter.

The pop star adds more bold, no-nonsense tales to her fifth album.

Five sweet and tart holiday originals, plus a twist on “White Christmas.”

Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.”

It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album Short n’ Sweet. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.”

With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.”

Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”