emails i can’t send (stylized in all lowercase) is Sabrina Carpenter’s fifth studio album. On it, the 23-year-old actress, producer and musician weaves a beautifully told story and takes listeners deep into her own internal struggles. She uses scraps from her therapy notes and emails she couldn’t send as inspiration for the song lyrics.
Carpenter’s newest release marks the singer’s clear evolution as a musician — shown by her use of delicate topics in her song lyrics, mature vocabulary (including curse words), and a unique storytelling format.
On Spotify, Carpenter released emails i can’t send: the enhanced album, which provides listeners with a few videos of the singer explaining the process behind creating this project. On this record, Carpenter also makes use of an interesting transition technique; at the end of most songs, she includes minor transition effects, such as voice memos from the recording sessions or even a message recorded at a different time. This helps to weave together all her songs in the album into one cohesive storyline.
With emails i can’t send, Carpenter dives deep into everything she’s gone through since her previous record, Singular II, released in 2019. Carpenter has been in the public eye for a very long time — her first acting credit is from 2011, her first big break, 2014, and her first studio album is from 2015. However, these last couple of years have been especially intense for the singer. She has been publicly involved in teenage-relationship-drama, all while working on multiple projects, including movies, this album and a brand new tour.
The album opens up with one of the most emotional songs in the album: “emails i can’t send”. This first song establishes right from the start what kind of album this is going to be: a highly intimate retelling of the artist’s most private experiences.
The song flows naturally, as if Carpenter is in an actual therapy session, just ranting about all her most painful emotions.
One of the best qualities of this album is that listeners can easily immerse themselves into these stories without knowing any external context about the singer’s life. A lot of her story does come through in the lyrics and adding her angelic voice and cool sound effects, this album can bring any listener exactly where Carpenter wanted them to go.
Carpenter’s sound on this record is quite experimental. The triple threat artist and her collaborators add multiple sound effects to many songs. In the chrous of “Vicious”, the singer uses a distortion effect to add to this song’s very specific tone. It’s also one of the most pop-like songs on the album — a big contrast to the opening of the record.
Sound-wise, this is quite the album. emails i can’t send constantly keeps surprising listeners by bringing in different sounds and constantly breaking expectations for what comes next. Again, demonstrating Carpenter’s immense growth as a music creator and performer.
“Tornado Warnings”, for example, brings listeners right into Carpenter’s story by adding sounds of sirens at the beginning of the song, relating to the song’s lyrics. In “Nonsense”, Carpenter sings, “feels so good I gotta jump the octave,” and she does jump the octave, which is a singing technique. This is a small detail that only shows how much thought, growth and skill was put into the making of this album.
Listening to emails i can’t send is a journey into Carpenter’s early-twenties mind, but ends up being incredibly relatable. It accompanies listeners through feelings of heartbreak, family trauma and anxiety and dives into what it means to be a young woman in the spotlight these days. Her newest release is an incredible picture of the artist’s growth in these last few years, and overall a great listen for anyone wanting to dance, needing to cry and everything in between.