That's that Sabrina 'Espresso': Frothy Carpenter hit ushers in summer

In a year that has already seen the charts flooded with new albums from pop queens Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, the top candidate for 2024’s Song of the Summer is from none of them. It’s from pop upstart Sabrina Carpenter.

The 24-year-old former Disney Channel star isn’t in the same league as those other pop vets — not yet, at least — but she’s winning the early battle for summer earworms with “Espresso,” her crazy catchy ode to caffeine and herself, whose lyrics have listeners doing double and triple takes and asking, “did she just say that?”

“That’s that me espresso,” Carpenter sings on the chorus of the frothy disco dancefloor come on, in which she compares herself to a cup of piercingly strong black coffee. “I’m like an espresso” might be a more linear way to get at what she’s trying to say, but that doesn’t necessarily fit the melody of the song, and pop music has never been about what you say as much as it is the way you say it. Thus, “that’s that me espresso.” (Just go with it, this is pop, we’re having fun here.)

The line is like when Brandon Flowers sang “are we human or are we dancer?” in The Killers’ “Human,” or when Grande sang “I only wanna die alive, never by the hands of a broken heart” in “Break Free.” It works because it doesn’t work. Pop music doesn’t need to make sense, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Carpenter opens the second verse of the song with the universal declaration “I’m working late, ‘cuz I’m a singer,” a line so simple and effective it becomes inarguable. Yes, singers work late! They have concerts to perform and late-night writing sessions to tend to and all sorts of other obligations that require them to keep odd hours. She’s working late cuz she’s a singer. Are you going to argue with her? It’s evocative, it stops you in your tracks, it makes you scratch your head but also say “yep, makes sense!”

The song’s pre-chorus finds Carpenter saying she “dream-came-trued it for ya,” turning the phrase “dream come true” into a verb and putting it in the past tense, with the ease of someone hitting send on a tweet. Has anyone ever bent our language so casually to her own will? (We’re giving Carpenter all the credit, but the song was co-written with Amy Allen, Steph Jones and producer Julian Bunetta.)  

But the secret of “Espresso” isn’t the first or second listen, it’s the 10^th or 12^th, as its weirdness fully creeps in and its deceptive simplicity takes over. (It’s worth noting that this is also a song where Carpenter intones that her “give-a-f---s are on vacation” — translation, she’s unbothered — and we’re not even talking about that line, because we’re so hung up on the others. That’s that her espresso.)

“Espresso” hit with calculated deployment three weeks ago, just before Carpenter’s performance at Coachella, where she gave the single its live debut. Its kitschy music video dropped the same day as the single and is a blast of pure summer, with Carpenter bopping around the beach like she’s in a ‘60s French New Wave film.

It’s also important to note that Carpenter is at the stage in her career when the stakes are low enough that she can take a bubbly song like “Espresso” and make it a hit. It’s too flip for someone whose songs come with expectations, from whom we crave declarative big picture statements in their music, which has become de rigueur from our pop superstars. Taylor Swift has so much pressure built up around the confessional aspect of her lyrics that if she were to drop lines as offhand as the ones Carpenter uses here (“switch it up like Nintendo”), she would be ridiculed. But we don’t need or want anything from Carpenter, which is what allows “Espresso” to be such a perfect jolt of pop caffeine.

“Espresso” comes between album cycles for Carpenter, whose debut “Eyes Wide Open” was released when she was 15 years old, and who starred on Disney’s “Boy Meets World” reboot, “Girl Meets World,” from 2014 to 2017. (Fun fact: Carpenter sang the National Anthem at the Detroit Lions' Thanksgiving day game in 2015.) Her modern pop persona started to come into its own with 2022’s “Emails I Can’t Send,” which was pushed along by the narrative of her being the other girl in “Driver’s License,” Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 smash. A deluxe edition of “Emails” was released last year, featuring the magnificently catchy “Feather,” and Carpenter’s profile received a significant boost when she opened for Swift’s international dates on her massively successful Eras Tour.

Which brings us to “Espresso” and its pending pop chart takeover. It hasn’t hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 yet, but it could get there soon, and it might camp out there for the summer. The world’s a tough place these days and we need all the levity we can get, and save for the decaf crowd, it’s a song that doesn’t ask anybody to take sides on anything. That’s that “Espresso” espresso. Make ours a venti, please.

agraham@detroitnews.com