After making a big splash this year with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” Sabrina Carpenter released her anticipated new album Short n’ Sweet today, which turns out to sound a lot more like “Please Please Please” than “Espresso” in general. (I love both songs, but the album’s strong resemblance to Kacey Musgraves is not a bad thing.) Along with the new LP comes a wildly entertaining music video for opening track “Taste.”

For what feels like the first time in a while, we’ve finally got some new pop stars really going off this year. One of them is Sabrina Carpenter. Technically, the 25-year-old Carpenter isn’t new. She was a Disney child star, and she’s on her fifth album. But Carpenter has had a series of huge breakout moments this year, releasing the massive hits “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” The former was a true song of the summer contender — Stereogum readers voted it #2, right behind Kendrick — and the latter debuted at #1. Carpenter already sold out her upcoming arena tour — a real accomplishment in this climate. Now, her much-anticipated album Short N’ Sweet is here. On first listen, this one pays off on the promise of those two songs.

A genuine question for our readers in Guam: How’s the coffee over there? The Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago this week, and during Tuesday night’s roll call, each state and US territory chose a song to represent them. Guam chose Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.”

Sabrina Carpenter performed at Outside Lands in San Francisco on Saturday night. During her headlining set (replacing Tyler, The Creator’s canceled one), Carpenter brought out Kacey Musgraves for a ’60s-inspired cover of Nancy Sinatra’s famous “These Boots Are Made For Walkin'” (a staple cover song of Musgraves’ on tour), which you can watch below via some fan-shot video.

Later this month, Sabrina Carpenter will unveil her highly anticipated new album Short N’ Sweet. The hype has been real with singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” the latter of which became her first #1 hit. On Friday, she debuted a new song called “Slim Pickins” with Jack Antonoff at the Grammy Museum in LA.

You, the people, have done your civic duty. The votes are in, and we can now announce the results of our annual Song Of The Summer poll.

In 1996, the Homerpalooza episode of The Simpsons depicted Cypress Hill accidentally booking the London Symphony Orchestra while high. (It was later revealed to be Peter Frampton’s orchestra; Sonic Youth also raided his cooler!) This unexpected orchestral collaboration materialized IRL 28 years later on Wednesday night at the London’s Royal Albert Hall.

I’m sure a ton of people have covered Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” by this point, but as far as I can tell, London Grammar are the first to do it on BBC Radio 1. The band’s Hannah Reid swung by the BBC studio recently to do a stripped-down piano rendition of 2024’s most plausible song of the summer.

Nothing to be embarrassed about here, motherfucker: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” has claimed the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100, marking the rising pop star’s first-ever #1 hit.

San Francisco’s Outside Lands and Chicago’s Lollapalooza festivals have lost one headliner and gained another. Tyler, The Creator was at the top of both fests’ lineups, but he won’t be at either one. Tyler was a surprise guest at last night’s Kendrick Lamar show, but now he’s dropped off both lineups, citing “personal reasons.”

Is chaos really chaos if you summon it on purpose? A few years ago, former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello went about the business of being a pop ingenue with determined seriousness and as much trying-hard as possible. She gave interviews about how she’d rather go out to dinner with her mom than attend an awards-show afterparty and how she never swore in her songs because she wanted to be a good role model for her sisters. Her singles, even when they didn’t sound theatrical, nevertheless had Broadway-audition energy: lots of effortful belting and vocal runs and romantic-lead scenarios. She was cast as Cinderella, which made sense. Now Cabello is showing up to Fallon interviews with Donatella Versace hair and telegenically irreverent stories about weekslong debauchery. More shockingly to pop heads, she pureed her showy, X Factor-trained voice into hyperpop goo on a blown-out, Gucci Mane-interpolating lead single that many people found genuinely offputting. (It has yet to crack the Billboard top 80.)

In retrospect, it had to happen. The two big pop stories of 2024, at least outside of the deluge of A-lister albums, have been the simultaneous rises of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, two artists who’d been lingering on the mainstream periphery and who have now surged in to dominate the conversation. Carpenter and Roan are vastly different artists with vastly different stories, but the parallels are irresistible. They’re about the same age — Carpenter 25, Roan 26. They both found cult fame over the past few years before opening-act gigs for established stars — Taylor Swift for Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo for Roan — and celebrated Coachella performances helped push them over the top. They both released well-timed singles earlier this year. Now, Carpenter has covered Roan.

Sabrina Carpenter already has one song of the summer contender with “Espresso,” which has climbed as far as #4 on the Hot 100 and topped the chart for weeks in the UK. (We were early adopters.) It seems like the song could still make it to #1 with the right luck, but that’s not stopping the rising pop star from rolling out another new track today.

Sabrina Carpenter was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live last night, working late ’cause she’s a singer. She of course did her meme-able hit “Espresso,” and she also performed “Feather” with an SNL-specific “Nonsense” outro. Carpenter also played Daphne in a gory, pre-taped Scooby-Do parody.

Saturday Night Live has Dua Lipa pulling double duty this Saturday as host and musical guest in the wake of new album Radical Optimism, and today they revealed the hosts and musical guests for two more episodes to close out Season 49.

(Yes, it’s a Taylor Swift column. The reason is simple: This is a pop column, and every artist in the industry knows better than to release a pop album the same week as Taylor Swift. What else is there to write about? Pearl Jam? UB40? Raffi?)

A decade ago, Hozier had a moment. With his 2013 debut single, the solemnly hearty sex jam “Take Me To Church,” Irish singer-songwriter Andrew John Hozier-Byrne made it all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Ever since then, Hozier has maintained a solid career, scoring lots of hits back home in Ireland and popping up in the presence of artists like Haim, boygenius, and a roots-rock all-star band assembled at the Newport Folk Festival. Hozier never went away, but it seemed like his big mainstream moment had come and gone.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)

Sabrina Carpenter — you indie blog readers are familiar with this person, right? She was the best friend character on Girl Meets World, the Disney Channel sitcom about the daughter of Corey and Topanga from Boy Meets World. She is assumed to be part of the love triangle that inspired fellow Disney alum Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license.” She’s been around the entertainment industry for a minute, and lately, she’s been ascending to real-deal pop stardom.

Girl In Red has been big since the beginning, but in the more recent years, TikTok definitely helped out with her fame. The Norwegian pop singer is getting ready for her new album I’m Doing It Again Baby!; so far she’s shared “Too Much” and “Doing It Again Baby.” Today, Marie Ulven is releasing “You Need Me Now?,” for which she teamed up with Sabrina Carpenter, who also has a lot of experience with virality on TikTok.

Pop star Sabrina Carpenter released her “Feather” video on Halloween. Within days, a Catholic priest who allowed part of the video to be shot inside his Brooklyn church had been relieved of his administrative duties, the New York Times reports.

We’re somehow three-quarters of the way into this fast-moving year. Out with the summer jams, in with the fall vibes. And hey, speaking of in with the new: I’m taking over as Stereogum’s pop columnist! You may have read my writing here – most recently on Ariana Grande – or on Pitchfork, Spin, the late, great Village Voice, or the late, great Singles Jukebox. (I’m noticing a trend here, but let’s move past it.) I also, as one does, have a Substack.

The initials “BBC” can stand for a couple of different things. One of them is “British Broadcasting Corporation,” and if you’ve ever been on any porn site, you don’t need me to tell you the other one. Evidently, someone at the BBC — the British Broadcasting Corporation one — is a little sensitive about that coincidence. When the American pop singer Sabrina Carpenter made a joke about it in a recent session in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge, she found herself censored.

Is it weird that a Jewish person who wasn’t allowed to listen to Christmas music growing up is now getting paid to write about Christmas music? As the Cure say, I don’t care if you don’t — life is full of delicious ironies. Just don’t tell my parents.

The double (or even triple) album might be thriving, but for a non-household name to release a 34-track album as their major-label debut? That’s pretty audacious. To do something like that, you need a compelling reason. What possible force could be pushing you? For rising country singer Zach Bryan, who released his 34-track American Heartbreak in May, the “why” justifies that level of output. And Bryan hasn’t stopped at 34 songs. On Friday he shared even more new music: a nine-song EP called Summertime Blues.

Conventional wisdom says that anything you put on the internet lives forever, whether it’s a long-buried YouTube video or unearthed LiveJournal entries from 2004. It’s true, the internet has a long memory. And yet artists like sad boi balladeer Joji have been using the medium to reinvent themselves every few years. For Joji, it’s definitely working.

Many songs on Juice WRLD's Death Race For Love, the reigning #1 album in America, made me laugh out loud. A track called "HeMotions," for instance, is already hilarious coming from an emo-informed SoundCloud sing-rapper who made his name on misogynistic self-pity, even before you even factor in lyrics like these: "Going through motions, muddy emotions/ Back on my bullshit, devil emoji." Most of the album barrels headfirst into unintentional satire, but I'm pretty sure at least one song is funny on purpose. It's called "Fast," and besides smoothing out Juice WRLD's most aggravating tics into something more like digestible pop music, it contains this punchline: "I go through so much, I'm 19 years old/ It's been months since I felt at home/ But it's OK 'cause I'm rich/ Psych! I'm still sad as a bitch!"

Pop music is a crazy industry, even more so in our fractured age. It's crazy how many songs can be blowing up in some corner of the world, online or off, without ever spilling over into the mass consciousness. It's crazy how many of those songs actually do spill over without some of us realizing it -- how many you can know from the grocery store or wherever without even realizing you know them. It's crazy how quickly the artists out front of those songs can go from obscurity to household name if they know what to do with their 15 minutes. It's crazy how many different points such a rise might originate from: a random streaming playlist placement, a well-played sync on a Netflix show, radio rotation mandated from on high, a social media post from an (ugh) influencer, even virality on a lip-syncing app.

It’s here: The lineup for the Billboard Hot 100 Music Festival was announced Tuesday (4/10). For the festival’s fourth year, DJ Snake, Future, and Rae Sremmurd will headline -- as well as a soon to-be-announced female artist.

Pop pop pop pop pop: It does not stop, even when your spirits drop. Sometimes it's pretty good, too! Sometimes it can comfort you in your sorrow and anger and confusion; sometimes it can lift those spirits right back up.