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.”