Sabrina Carpenter’s “Emails I Can’t Send:” Reviewed

Check your inbox for one of the brightest pop comeback albums of the year. On July 15, singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter released her fifth studio album entitled, “Emails I Can’t Send,” and she did not hold back.

Carpenter began her path to stardom at a young age. The Lehigh Valley native made her big break starring in Disney’s “Boy Meets World” spinoff, “Girl Meets World” and signing onto a contract with Hollywood Records. With Carpenter’s debut album, “Eyes Wide Open” putting the 15-year-old on the map, four albums soon followed, fulfilling her five-album contract. In 2018, Carpenter dealt with a lawsuit from her former managers and ultimately won, claiming her victory the only way she know how, through her music. She released a new single, “Sue Me” which would feature on her “Singular: Act I” album.

Come January 2021, a doe-eyed shiny new pop-star found her single flying off the charts. With her single “Driver’s License,” Olivia Rodrigo leapt into a path of pop stardom that Carpenter had seemingly been working toward for the majority of her life. Because of an alleged love triangle between Carpenter, Rodrigo and singer and actor Joshua Bassett, Carpenter was thrust into a year filled with internet hate and controversy.

During this time, Carpenter also changed labels, now signing with Island Records. Carpenter even broke her one year hiatus of releasing her own musical projects to release a single, “Skin,” attempting to address rumors, but the song sounded confusing and initially pretentious.

By Sep. 2021, Carpenter was ready to leave the internet’s battlefield. With her release of “Skinny Dipping,” a lighthearted three-minute melody where the singer is sent out into the sea of her mind. Carpenter describes that she wrote the song to resemble talking to herself in dreamt up scenarios. This creative twist on songwriting quickly made her fans —no matter how big the fanbase was— intrigued to hear more.

Soon after, in early 2022, Carpenter started sending hints: she hid clues in her new music videos and interviews, teased short clips of unreleased lyrics and even developed an email list for fans to decode new track titles and gear up for her long anticipated release. On Feb. 18, Carpenter released “Fast Times,” a lively pop anthem with an accompanying music video that speaks to early 2000s pop superstar Britney Spears’ past work. Into the summer, Carpenter released “Vicious” as a surprise, and it grasped the attention of her fans.

With three released songs ready and waiting by the summer of 2022, Carpenter announced her debut album with a hotel-bed-inspired cover art, signaling for an outpour of emotion unlike any of her premature work. The process was slow-moving and surreal for the perfectionist who underwent the early-20s trip of a lifetime. She explains that the album first started with her “writing letters” to herself in the form of unsent emails, a technique she used in therapy. She used this method to cope with her personal matters, and it helped her through a whirlwind romance.

But there’s more of a nuance to the album where we get to see inside Carpenter herself. The album is not simply examining her hardship. The title track of the album is a short outpouring piano ballad accompanied by a growing string instrumental. This track deals with a narrative where a father cheated on his wife, and the song is written from the daughter’s perspective of it all. As a listener and a reader of emotional narrative, this track became one of the most sincere depictions of pain from a healed perspective.

“Read your Mind” already catches the eye with its capitalized lettering, which is said to be done to directly and accurately reflect the way Carpenter’s emails were truly written. This saucy number screams pop in an electrifying mess of sultry vocals and storyline.

“Tornado Warnings” has a backtracking that positively enthralls the ears. Carpenter writes in this fourth track about a highly unique and confirmed-to-be-true experience of being so uncomfortable with her therapist at the time that she felt she had to lie about the guy she had been seeing. This track is one of my favorites, and, as stan accounts on Twitter have pointed out to each other, Carpenter has been deemed a “second verse queen” for the significance and poignancy in her second verses. Here, she hits the title and theme on the head by writing, “Sometimes I wish I kept / some of my feelings in the basement / so I’d still have some left.” If we all do not share the image of hiding in a basement during tornado warnings, then I don’t know what to think, but I feel that the tornado metaphor perfectly represents Carpenter’s topic.

With the album release, there was another new single and its music video picked out. “Because I Liked a Boy” addresses all the dirty rumors and death threats that impacted Carpenter over the past year and a half, and completely changed the way many listeners on the internet felt about Carpenter and her image. From lyrics like “I’m a homewrecker I’m a slut / I’ve got death threats filling up semi-trucks / Tell me who I am, guess I don’t have a choice” to “When everything went down / we’d already broken up,” this song let Carpenter make sure no one would ever mess with her career again.

The rest of the album is packed with other playful, vibrant, sexy songs like, “bet u wanna,” and “Nonsense,” as well as songs that convey sticky breakup situations in “Already Over,” and “Bad for Business.” Lastly, the closing track and a personal favorite is “decode,” a shimmering instrumental capturing a chapter of closure where, for Carpenter, “There’s nothing left here to decode.”

Most of the tracks on the album were collaboratively written by Carpenter alongside Julia Michaels and JP Saxe. In this album, we get to see Carpenter close up for the first time in her adult life. I think that to me, that’s why this album speaks so similarly to a debut — it is possibly the single most mature female pop album I have consumed.

Kristine Kearns is a third-year English major with a minor in Creative Writing. KK947319@wcupa.edu