Sabrina Carpenter Has Waited Her Whole Life for This

This profile is published as part of our TIME100 Next list, recognizing 100 emerging leaders from across the world who are shaping the future.

Sabrina Carpenter is settling into a tiny banquette, one leg in pinstripe capris folded onto the bench, when she orders a… cappuccino. The obvious joke hangs in the air. “I've intentionally stopped myself from getting them now,” the “Espresso” singer says. The last time she was at this particular French restaurant in downtown New York, they surprised her with a round of espresso martinis.

It’s the kind of thing that surely happens all the time, now that the 25-year-old artist—unmissable with big, bright blonde curls and a 5-ft. frame—has rapidly become one of the most famous women in pop culture. To say that “Espresso” was one of the songs, if not the song, of the summer hardly captures the extent of her reach. The disco-iNFLected bop, released in April, became her first to exceed a billion streams on Spotify, where it hit No. 1 globally. But Carpenter’s buzz only got louder in June when she dropped the music video for “Please Please Please” (another Spotify global No. 1), co-starring her rumored boyfriend, the Oscar-nominated actor Barry Keoghan. And the singer sent the internet into a full-blown tizzy in August when she released her clever and cutting, genre-blending album Short n’ Sweet alongside another viral video: a campy, Death Becomes Her-iNFLuenced love-triangle romp, co-starring Jenna Ortega, for “Taste.” The album, now certified platinum, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 at release and became the third biggest debut of the year, trailing only Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.

Carpenter is everywhere. Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Christina Aguilera, and Selena Gomez have all sung her praises. If you didn’t catch her on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, you probably saw her on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. If you didn’t see her at Coachella, you definitely tuned in for her performance at the VMAs. And if you missed her opening for Swift on 25 stops of the Eras tour, you cannot be helped. The moment Carpenter herself says she knew she’d reached a new level: when there was a joke about her in Dan and Eugene Levy’s opening monologue for the 2024 Emmys. “That was probably the first time I was like, Oh, I'm not even there.”

When we meet for an afternoon pick-me-up, just over a month has passed since the album release, and Carpenter has been going nonstop. She’s back home in New York after the first three shows in her sold-out, 33-date Short n’ Sweet tour, fresh off an 11-hour bus ride from Detroit. Hence the need for caffeine. “TMI,” she adds, “But I’m in my luteal phase, and just feeling like a monster.” When the server comes by with coffee, she orders a chocolate mousse for us to share. 

Carpenter may appear to have materialized from nowhere as a fully formed pop star, but she has been grinding for 16 years. Growing up in East Greenville, Pa., she started posting videos of herself singing on YouTube when she was 9. Her big break came at 13, when she landed a role in Girl Meets World, a reboot of the classic ’90s series Boy Meets World. Carpenter makes a point to note that she signed with her first label, Disney’s Hollywood Records, at 12—before she booked the TV show. “I knew that I wouldn't be able to thrive as a recording artist the same way I would have been able to working on a show as a child actor,” she says, “which I know sounds weird to have that perspective at 12, but I was really lucky to.”

Carpenter released four albums with the Disney-owned label between 2015 and 2019 and continued to act, in movies like Adventures in Babysitting, The Hate U Give, and Tall Girl. But she couldn’t quite break through to the mainstream as an artist. “For a long time, I was constantly guided and misguided,” she says. “I'm so grateful for all of those times where I was led astray, because now I'm a lot more equipped going into situations where I have to trust my own instincts.”

Her 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send—her first more adult project on a new label—was an opportunity to do just that. She put out a collection of songs about heartbreak, attraction, and scrutiny that were wiped clean of Disney’s perfectionistic sheen. “My last album was f-cking sad, straight up,” Carpenter says. She describes the first stretch of the pandemic, when she was 21, as a time when she realized she wanted to “make some mistakes,” or at least be less hard on herself. “I wanted to make sure to still be young while I’m young… To go through your life trying to be a little robot angel, you’re going to have a lot of regrets later,” she says. “That’s also why during that time of my life I was a little bit of an emotional wreck.”

The album contained songs that fans connected with tantalizing gossip, having deduced that Carpenter might have been the “blonde girl” described as winning over the person (purportedly fellow Disney actor Joshua Bassett) who broke Olivia Rodrigo’s heart in “Driver’s License.” Carpenter’s song “Because I Liked a Boy” seemed to respond: “Now I'm a homewrecker, I'm a slut / I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.”

“Because I Liked a Boy” made an impression during Carpenter’s Eras tour performances—but it was another song, “Nonsense,” about getting tongue-tied around a crush, that got new audiences hooked on the cheeky sensibility she's become known for. Carpenter says the tour with Swift, where she had no set, dancers, or props for her act, taught her how to stand in front of a crowd alone and put on a show. It stirred up hype for a tradition, which had begun on her Emails tour, where she delivered a punny new outro for “Nonsense” each night, creating viral clip after clip as the lines got more suggestive and ridiculous. One night in Australia: “Broke up ’cause the size was underwhelming/ Tried to give him pointers, wasn’t helping/ Maybe I just need a boy from Melbourne.” She confirms that she’s done with the bit, at least for now. “The extreme ‘it's over forever’ is just not in my repertoire. Maybe I’ll feel random one day and bring it back,” she says, but, “that was for that album, for that era. You’ve got to keep a thing good.”

Carpenter may be only 25, but she is coming into her own with the earned confidence of a veteran, and she knows how to give the people what they want. Her brand—she’s short, she’s funny, and she’s horny—is specific enough to feel authentic but also general enough to capture an ever-broadening audience. And she’s not afraid to make a joke about herself. “If you want to call me a Polly Pocket, a Bratz doll, I don't care,” she says. “You'll meet me and then you'll be like, damn, she talks a lot more than the dolls do.” It takes a certain amount of time under pressure to build the sense of self that Carpenter embodies—we’ve seen it this year with artists like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, too. It’s hard to remember now, but even Swift was once a rising country-music star trying to break into the mainstream.

Jack Antonoff, who worked with Carpenter on multiple Short n’ Sweet tracks, was following her career long before they collaborated. “I look at all Sabrina's work, and she's just crystallized more and more,” he told TIME in a recent interview. “I guess the lesson there is there was nothing wrong. It was just about staying the course. That's really what it is to be an artist.”

Carpenter is reaping the benefits of her persistence. “There were so many things I dreamt of doing as a little girl I got to do this year that felt like such a cool, sweet, little bucket-list moment for my younger self,” she says. “I literally threw up when I found out about SNL. Not to be graphic.” The VMAs performance was another dream realized. “I grew up watching those performances and being like, I want to do that. But then it all just seemed so—not even out of reach, just like I had a different plan in my head of when it was all supposed to happen,” she says, meaning it wasn’t supposed to take this long. But now that everything has unfolded the way it has, Carpenter can see the advantage. “I feel so prepared for these moments,” she says. “If I was even 17 or 18, I think I would have been way, way more nervous and intimidated.” 

The next thing that could make her throw up with excitement, if the call came tomorrow: “If I could perform at the Grammys.” 

As polished and well-packaged as the Sabrina Carpenter brand is, it’s her willingness to be messy that really makes it all work. In Short n’ Sweet, she’s in turns cocky, desperate, Petty, brutal, deliriously horny, and not all that pressed. The effect is that, no matter the drama at hand, Carpenter refuses to take herself too seriously. “I like the fact that I just put out a song that starts with ‘I can't relate to desperation,’ and then I’m putting out the most desperate possible sounding chorus I could in my life,” she says, of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” “The idea is like: if everything is super calculated, then the second you make a statement, that's who you are for the rest of your life—as opposed to it being like: or you can be super confident one day and then the most emotional wreck the next day.”

Carpenter describes Short n’ Sweet as a “time capsule” of a certain period in her life, and a few songs on the album seem to, fairly overtly, reference a relationship she had with Shawn Mendes during off-again stretches of his past romance with Camila Cabello. (See: the lyrics of “Coincidence” analyzed against timelines of who was seen where with whom. See also: the roast ballad “Dumb & Poetic,” “Taste,” and a particularly savage line of “Slim Pickins.”) Likewise, casting Keoghan in the video for “Please Please Please,” a song about begging her actor boyfriend not to embarrass her, pretty much eliminated the possibility that anyone would think it wasn’t about him.

Carpenter won’t say specifically who she was thinking of when writing any of her songs—no savvy pop star would—but she is willing to talk about the feelings within them. “It'll probably bite me in the ass at some point,” she says, knocking wood, “but it's been a really therapeutic album to be able to just say what I'm thinking.” One example: “Please Please Please” captures a love-hate dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who’s found themselves wondering if they’re in the wrong relationship. “I’m so blunt and forward. I feel like, what is the reason that we're all hiding from each other when these are just real things? Sometimes men embarrass you. That's super normal,” she says.

Now, starting to see crowds sing along with her on tour, she’s recognizing how relatable that song in particular is. “This just really hits for the girls that have every right to go back to someone who isn't good for them, and know that those mistakes are absolutely human to make, and repeatedly.” She takes a bite of chocolate mousse, a dollop of whipped cream and a few cookie crumbles on top. “The amount of times that we've all been with people we shouldn't be,” she continues. “We either learn it the hard way, or we are a miracle and we end up marrying that person.”

When the lights dim before Carpenter takes the stage at Madison Square Garden two nights later, the collective scream is head-splitting. She dashes onstage in a towel that she opens, eyebrows raised, to reveal a glittering yellow Victoria’s Secret bodysuit. The show takes off from there, an hour and a half of glitzy group dance sequences, intimate ballads, and winking innuendos set in a two-story New York City penthouse. There’s a fireplace in the living room, a moody, after-dark balcony, a pink satin bedroom, and even a bathroom, where, in an offbeat highlight of the show, Carpenter sits on a toilet and ruminates as she sings about a hot dummy who jerked her around. “Some songs feel like bathroom thoughts to me, like when you're at a party and you go to the bathroom to cry or judge yourself in the mirror,” she says. “It's comical but also brings a little groundedness to the show.”

Despite Carpenter’s years of experience—including opening for Swift on the massive Eras tour—the intensity of playing her own arena shows is new. “The first two shows, there were enough technical difficulties to ruin my life,” she says. There’s a part when she gets lifted 18 feet into the air on a giant heart—on the first night, she got stuck at the top. “I was up there far longer than I was supposed to be,” she says, a reminder of why, after seeing Matty Healy perform on a rooftop set for a 1975 show, she thought playing with heights on tour would be too scary. Suspended over the crowd in Columbus, Ohio, she just kept singing and hoped that someone offstage was working to get her down. (They did.) “If one thing malfunctions, it can affect the whole show,” she says. “So I've just been learning, rewiring my brain, to be able to handle stuff like that.” Aside from tech issues, the hardest part is not tripping—Carpenter is constantly running up and down stairs. There was no intensive pre-tour training regimen, and her body is feeling it. “I've started doing ice baths like a little spiritual man,” she admits, a tad embarrassed.

Throughout the concert, Carpenter quite literally wears her sexuality on her sleeve. “Femininity is something that I've always embraced. And if right now that means corsets and garter belts and fuzzy robes or whatever the f-ck, then that's what that means,” she says. She adds a babydoll negligee over the bodysuit in the first act, changes into a black lace catsuit and slips into a slinky robe, both by French designer Patou, in the second, and, in the final set, steps out in an ultra-sparkly two-piece halter top and skirt from Ludovic de Saint Sernin, made with crystal mesh donated by Swarovski. Carpenter’s stylist Jared Ellner teases that there will be different lyrics printed onto Carpenter’s tights throughout the tour: they did “Taste me” for night one and “I’m working late” for Madison Square Garden. The singer notes that this is the first tour where she has doubles of her outfits. “In the past it would be like, if that outfit has stains on it, good luck,” she says. Some of the corset dresses she wore on the Eras tour were in pale colors: “I would sweat, and it would just be terrible.”

With all the lingerie and innuendos in mind, I ask Carpenter if, a generation later, she has been spared the vilification that artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera suffered for daring to incorporate their sexuality into their work. “No, I definitely get that as well,” she says. She’s trying to remember that social media is an echo chamber. “Someone told me this, whenever I would get upset or feel like I'm the only one getting criticized for something other people are able to do seemingly so freely: I'm the one that's seeing all the negative sh-t about myself. My friends don't see that.”

Artists like Madonna, Aguilera, Spears, Beyoncé, and Rihanna all helped pave the way, Carpenter says. “But you'll still get the occasional mother that has a strong opinion on how you should be dressing. And to that I just say, don't come to the show and that’s OK. It's unfortunate that it's ever been something to criticize, because truthfully, the scariest thing in the world is getting up on a stage in front of that many people and having to perform as if it's nothing. If the one thing that helps you do that is the way you feel comfortable dressing, then that's what you’ve got to do.”

Her approach seems to be working. “Juno,” a seductive pop song that references the 2007 teen-pregnancy movie, brings a show-stopping moment when Carpenter drops into a suggestive position and delivers the line, “Have you ever tried this one?”—then rises into the air on the heart-shaped platform. At Madison Square Garden, she bends on her knees, whips her hair, and jumps up and down above the crowd, ebullient.

Somewhere in the arena is Carpenter’s mom, seeing the show for the first time. Her dad and 94-year-old grandfather came to opening night in Columbus. “My fans online are like, I can’t believe she's bending over in front of her grandparents!” Carpenter says. “I'm like, girl, they are not paying attention to that. They’re just like, I can’t believe all these people are here.”

It feels a little absurd to ask Carpenter what’s next—she’ll be on the road through March, and isn’t that enough? But she’s already tinkering with new songs (a constant practice) and she hints that there are “a few projects” she’s working on for after the tour. In the nearer term, Halloween is coming up; she’ll go big, and she’ll take it as a massive compliment if you choose to dress up as her. And in December, she’ll release a holiday special on Netflix. “It's an hour of literal nonsense,” she says. “If people are expecting boring, me singing by a tree, it's not that. It's so fun, so chaotic. There are so many guests that I’m excited about.” 

To Carpenter, it’s all still a bit surreal. She says she’s been looking out at the crowds at night, checking to make sure they’re really all there to hear her songs. It makes her easy to root for: the girl who found her way into this world before she knew who she was, finally finding the success she’s worked so hard for only now that she can trust herself to do it all her way. 

I make a comment about how much experience she has behind her, despite being so young. She says thank you, and it’s clear she means it. “People like to make you feel like, when you’re above 21 in this industry, you’re haggard,” Carpenter says, her laugh filling the air. “But I’m trying to remember that I’m still quite young.”

Set design by Liam Moore; styling by Jared Ellner; hair by Scott King; make-up by Sam Visser; nails by Zola Ganzorigt; photographed at Hubble Studio