Sabrina Carpenter

Sabrina Carpenter has made the transition from teen-TV star to pop-dominating force look remarkably easy. It helps that the actor and singer-songwriter—born in 1999 in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania—pursued both sides of her career in tandem, releasing music while establishing a regular presence on the Disney Channel and through other acting gigs, including on Broadway. And on her first two albums—2015’s Eyes Wide Open and 2016’s EVOLution—Carpenter set herself apart from her teenage peers with her deft delivery and her eagerness to embrace plenty of dance music sounds. Singular Act I and Singular Act II—a two-part album that dropped in 2018 and 2019—provided yet more proof of her fast-developing abilities as a singer and songwriter who had moved past teen-star stereotypes to become a full-fledged club powerhouse.

Later, Carpenter stepped back sonically to express herself more personally, as on the intimately acoustic “skinny dipping,” from her fifth album, emails i can’t send. Still, the sheer fun of it all has never waned. Just listen to one of the many ad-libbed outros in her live performances of the album’s pop hit “Nonsense,” or indeed the lyrical playfulness of “Espresso,” the flirty funk banger that became summer 2024’s defining hit—and which provided Carpenter’s official breakout moment. Next came the Jack Antonoff-produced “Please Please Please” (which became the summer’s second-biggest hit) and her sixth record Short n’ Sweet, a showcase of the most winking, witty music of Carpenter’s career so far. But if it saw the newly crowned pop princess take aim at past relationships, it also saw her take aim at herself. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.”