emails i can't send

Sabrina Carpenter's fifth studio album, released July 15, 2022 on Island Records, represents the most confessional and fully realized work of her career up to that point. A deluxe edition, emails i can't send fwd:, followed in March 2023 with four additional tracks.

The album's title emerged from Carpenter's personal writing practice: she discovered that drafts composed for her own eyes only, letters she wrote but never sent, contained her most unguarded emotional truths. That concept anchors the record's confessional tone. Carpenter described it as a "time capsule" of her experiences and wrote the material over several years, completing recording in New York City in 2021.

The album emerged directly from the highly public drama surrounding Carpenter's relationship with actor Joshua Bassett and the viral fallout from Olivia Rodrigo's 2021 single "drivers license," whose fanbase widely interpreted as aimed at Carpenter. The online harassment Carpenter endured during that period -- death threats, doxxing, public shaming -- became fuel for songs like "because i liked a boy," the album's most directly confrontational track. The record as a whole traces an arc from that public wound inward, through progressively more intimate emotional territory.

Critically, the album was named to Rolling Stone's and Billboard's Best Albums of 2022 lists. Vogue called it "the most fully realized vision of Carpenter the musician and the most rounded portrait of Carpenter the human being yet." It debuted at No. 23 on the US Billboard 200 and reached No. 21 in the UK. The lead single "Nonsense" went viral on TikTok, while "Feather," added on the deluxe edition, became her longest-charting Hot 100 entry at No. 21.