Sabrina Carpenter: the screwball starlet

Their presence feels at odds with Carpenter’s position as pop’s perkiest new star. These gigs come 15 months after her hit song of last summer, Espresso, and follow her coquettish album, Short n’ Sweet, and its wildly popular arena tour. Success was a slow burn: this was Carpenter’s sixth album. But pop ubiquity is now hers, tied up in a satin bow. She is a newly minted superstar.

Her songs are full of zingy aperçus from the front lines of dating in the 2020s. Her 2022 hit Because I Liked a Boy details how falling in love publicly with someone on the rebound can result in online vitriol. “Now I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut,” Carpenter sings from the long runway at Hyde Park, “I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.”

Duran Duran won’t mean much to Carpenter’s crowd. This is an overwhelmingly gen Z, even gen Alpha audience, plus chaperones. (Though an obligatory cheer goes up for the band, the atmosphere in the crowd afterwards is one of confusion.) But in another sense, Hungry Like the Wolf is an apt cover. It’s about lust – and Carpenter’s unapologetic sexuality is the foundation of her brand.

On her Short n’ Sweet tour, Carpenter’s stage antics included a playful rota of sexual positions; these Hyde Park shows have been toned down. The set is framed by a retro TV featuring Carpenter as a news anchor and tongue-in-cheek advertisements for products such as “Manchild Spray Away”. (“Remove messy men from your life!”) There are still nods to threesomes, and a group of dancers cavort on a big fluffy bed during Bed Chem, after a brief and too-late disclaimer that “Parental discretion is advised”.

Carpenter’s output is largely the stuff of camp. But when the cover of her imminent seventh album was revealed – showing the pop star on all fours, her hair being grabbed by a standing male figure, under the title Man’s Best Friend – there was outcry. Is this image, in a porn-saturated age of soaring rates of sexual violence, purely misogynist titillation? Or post-feminist satire? Tonight, that album’s lead single, Manchild, is played for laughs, with the crowd chanting out synonyms for male hopelessness. “Stupid? Or is it … slow? Maybe it’s ... useless!”

This gig marks a crossroads. If Carpenter once styled herself as a quirky retro starlet whose every tune came with a wink and an implicit “am I right, girls?”, she is now plugged into the mainstream pop success continuum, where the top musicians reinforce one another’s fame. For all her gestures to irony, Carpenter – with her straight white teeth, blonde ambition and unthreatening music – feels as though she could represent a fightback from old school, normcore pop, after a destabilising period where the mainstream umbrella expanded to include more alternative influences from Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan.

Eilish brought hip-hop-adjacent baggy clothes, weird nightmares and ASMR to the charts. Rodrigo, a fellow Disney Channel star whose story is bound up in Carpenter’s via a mutual ex, channelled a love for alternative rock bands such as the Breeders and the Cure. Roan came up DIY-style through queer clubbing and borrowing from drag queens. And that’s before we start on the riot that was Charli XCX’s Brat. Next to these artists, Carpenter looks like a product of a more traditional star-making machine: pastel colours, screwball comedy, only a frisson here and there of R&B, in the vein of Ariana Grande. If anything, that controversial album cover art seems almost reactive. You can feel her team wondering: perhaps Carpenter might find her edge by going a little S&M?

Carpenter may be retrogressive, but her charms are potent. She comes from a tried-and-trusted talent pipeline, and yet she still has the air of possessing agency and wit to burn. Everything she wears is sparkly, but her pop is full of intelligence. She is clever enough to climb on a cherry picker and aerially traverse the more budget section of the crowd at this very corporate festival (which is full of brand-sponsored VIP areas).

And she has earned the right to toast her own success with an espresso martini at the end of Espresso. Her “who, me?” face is both the product of fame school and a warm invitation to come in on the joke.

Photographs by Jordan Hughes/ Alfredo Flores