Review: Sabrina Carpenter, 'Emails I Can't Send'

Sabrina Carpenter was dealt a bad hand. The post-Golden Age of Disney Channel was ill-equipped to harness and nurture her talents as a singer and songwriter, and for four albums she’s struggled to find her footing in mainstream pop. Emails I Can’t Send, her fifth studio album, arrives in the wake of Sabrina’s proper mainstream breakthrough — a breakthrough that found her at the receiving end of unwarranted hate due to an alleged love triangle between her, three-time Grammy winner Olivia Rodrigo, and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star Joshua Bassett.

We all know how the story goes, but that’s not what’s important. Emails I Can’t Send is, in essence, a conglomerate of once-in-a-career opportunities, yet Sabrina doesn’t take advantage of those opportunities as aggressively as she should. This is the album that should position her as a viable pop star in her own right, present her perspective of the love triangle drama, and establish her artistic profile for the average listener. Emails I Can’t Send doesn’t really do any of that. If the album’s songs are to be taken as a literal collection of emails that Sabrina didn’t send, then the confusing array of musical influences and lack of cohesiveness would make a little bit of sense. The thing is, in order for that concept to work, each song has to be conceptually rich in its own right. Unfortunately, there are far too many utterly forgettable songs for this concept to be fully realized.

The stream-of-consciousness title track gets the album off to a strong start. Sabrina sings from the perspective of a daughter who discovers that her father is having an affair. “Emails I Can’t Send” establishes the confessional nature of the album, but banal instrumentation stifles the song from reaching its full potential. The beginning of Emails I Can’t Send features two moments of whiplash that are so intense that they genuinely make the rest of the album feel disorienting. “Vicious,” a track that inexplicably softens its rock edge, is a stark departure from the title track’s contemplative Top 40 balladry. “Read Your Mind,'“ on the other hand, emerges with a post-disco flair and a particularly impressive string arrangement courtesy of Leroy Clampitt. The immediate lack of musical continuity is even more puzzling considering the dominant country-pop influences that populate the back half of the album on songs like “Already Over,” “Bet U Wanna",” and “Nonsense.”

An album that lacks cohesiveness can still be salvaged by consistently strong vocal performances. A gifted singer and actress, Sabrina has a wonderful voice that shapeshifts far too often on Emails I Can’t Send. When she’s singing songs co-written by Julia Michaels, Sabrina adopts the “Issues” singer’s vowel-breaking tendencies and talk-singing approach to songs. This is most apparent on “Tornado Warning,” a conceptually sound song that suffers from how obviously Sabrina is following Julia’s run-on sentence vocal template. When Sabrina is singing songs that she co-wrote with Julian Bunetta, however, she adopts the kind of personality-devoid Top 40 stock voice that characterized the power pop of One Direction’s first three albums.

Despite the sizable amount of boring and forgettable songs, Emails I Can’t Send’s chief triumph is arguably enough to hold the project together. “Because I Liked A Boy,” a soul-baring reflection on the “drivers license” backlash, is damn near perfect. This is the song the response that “Skin” failed to be. Simultaneously angry and apathetic, this is the best song on the album. Lyrically, Sabrina and her collaborators successfully walk the fine line between wry humor (“Dating boys with exes / No, I wouldn't recommend it”) and genuine anguish (“Tell me who I am, guess I don't have a choice / All because I liked a boy”). This is one of the few times that Emails I Can’t Send feels focused.

Emails is unlikely to move the needle for Sabrina outside of some relatively strong first-week numbers. This isn’t because she lacks the capability to create a body of work that can move the needle, it’s because there’s a disconnect between her vision and the execution. New collaborators will definitely help, but Sabrina also needed to establish a clear sound for this album; she gets lost in the sprawling spread of disparate musical influences. Emails I Can’t Send simply fails to live up to the potential of its overarching concept.

Key Tracks: “Emails I Can’t Send” | “Read Your Mind” | “Because I Liked A Boy”

Score: 50