The Short Version
“Taste” is Sabrina Carpenter telling her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend that every time he kisses her, she is kissing Carpenter too. He has not moved on. He has just moved the problem somewhere else. Not grief. Not jealousy. A five-foot woman calmly explaining that she is impossible to get rid of, and she would like you to know that before you get too comfortable.
That is what the song is about. Everything else follows from that.
Why This Song Comes First
By the time Short n’ Sweet arrived in August 2024, Carpenter had already put two number ones from it on the UK chart before the album dropped. “Espresso” spent seven weeks at the top. “Please Please Please” spent five. Most artists treat a third single as a victory lap. Carpenter opened the album with it instead.
The album title is not about her height. She told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe she was thinking about relationships that were the shortest she had ever had and hit the hardest. “Taste” is that idea in its most concentrated, most unapologetic form.
The production team is effectively a map of the last decade of pop radio. Co-written with Julia Michaels, Amy Allen, John Ryan, and Ian Kirkpatrick, produced by Ryan, Kirkpatrick, and Julian Bunetta. Between them: Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” and both of Carpenter’s previous singles from this same album. They know how to make something sound easy while hiding how engineered it actually is.
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What the Lyrics Are Actually Doing
The song opens with a joke that is not really a joke.
Oh, I leave quite an impression / Five feet to be exact.
Small, and she left a mark so big that half his wardrobe went with her. Two things at once: she was not someone who slipped by unnoticed, and the evidence of what happened is already in the girlfriend’s house.
The pre-chorus pulls the geometry tighter.
One degree of separation…
You and I are not strangers. We share the same man, which means we are closer than either of us asked for.
Then the chorus lands and it is genuinely audacious. Not “I still love him.” Not “I want him back.” Just:
You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you.
Not a threat. Something more unsettling than a threat. A fact, stated plainly, by someone who no longer needs to do anything about it.
The second verse builds the case rather than restating it. He is funnier now. His jokes hit different. Guess who he learned that from? Carpenter is not telling the girlfriend what she had with him. She is telling her what she gave him, and pointing out that the girlfriend is the beneficiary whether she likes it or not.
The bridge is where the song changes its weight. Carpenter stops arguing and starts withdrawing. You can have him. Been there, done it once or twice. Singing about it does not mean she cares. Then the most loaded line:
Yeah, I know I’ve been known to share.
That lands differently depending on what you know. For anyone who followed the 2021 situation involving Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Joshua Bassett, it is Carpenter acknowledging her own history as the third party without disputing it, without defending herself, just folding it into the argument.
Rodrigo’s “deja vu” was widely read as being aimed at Carpenter as the person who moved into someone else’s space. Here, Carpenter leans into it. She is not denying she has been that person. She is making it part of her point.
Who the Song Is About
The theory that aligns most cleanly with the public timeline is Shawn Mendes. Carpenter and Mendes were photographed together repeatedly in early 2023. About two months later, Mendes was photographed at Coachella with Camila Cabello. The on-again, off-again structure in the chorus, the girlfriend who came back, the man who had recently been somewhere else entirely, maps onto what was publicly documented.
The casting in the video strengthens the reading. Jenna Ortega, who plays the rival, is a Latina brunette around 5’2″. So is Cabello. Whether that was deliberate, the resemblance was noted immediately and has never been denied.
Carpenter, speaking to Paper magazine, said the series of unfortunate events she has encountered in relationships are no secret to people who know her, or think they know her. She is not confirming names. The details are specific enough that her audience can connect them without her having to draw the line.
What the Video Does With All of That
The parental advisory warning before a single note plays is not a formality. It is accurate.
The video, directed by Dave Meyers, opens on a bedroom covered in weapons. Knives of different sizes in neat rows where intimacy should be. From that image, the rules are different.
What follows is stylised ultraviolence that never quite becomes real. Carpenter dodges gunshots with the casual ease of someone who does this before breakfast. She checks her makeup in a knife blade while chaos runs around her. She gets impaled on a fence post, looks down at it going through her stomach, and carries on. Death here is a temporary inconvenience.
The standout sequence is built around the song’s central metaphor. Ortega and Campbell are kissing, the camera pulls back, and Carpenter has replaced him in Ortega’s perception.
That is the entire argument of the song made literal.
Ortega grabs a chainsaw, the hallucination breaks, and she has put it through the actual boyfriend. He is dead. Carpenter stands next to her, completely unharmed, having never been there.
The Kill Bill reference arrives when Ortega reappears in a nurse’s uniform with an eye patch. Earlier, Carpenter stabbed her in the eye with a knife. The eye patch is continuity. The nurse outfit is a direct lift from Elle Driver, and it works because Ortega has the bone structure and the energy to make it feel like a threat rather than a costume.
Child’s Play gets its moment through a voodoo doll standoff that goes wrong for both parties. Carpenter controls Ortega’s movements, looks pleased with herself, then Ortega produces her own Carpenter doll and throws it into the fire. The logic is Chucky’s logic: the supernatural enters the domestic and nobody comes out clean.
The Psycho nod is the sharpest reference in the video. Carpenter arrives at the mansion, knife in hand, finds Ortega and the boyfriend in a shower, moves to strike. Rather than following the script, Ortega cuts off Carpenter’s arm. The homage acknowledges the source and then does something different with it, which is the more interesting move.
The whole visual architecture of the mansion draws from Death Becomes Her, the 1992 Robert Zemeckis dark comedy in which Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn sustain impossible injuries while competing over the same man. The parallel is not loose. Both stories are about rivals who cannot fully harm each other and eventually have to reckon with the fact that the man at the centre was never the point. There is also a quieter nod in the funeral scene to the early promotional images for Beetlejuice 2, which arrived in cinemas that same September with Ortega as Astrid Deetz. The shared funeral aesthetic was caught immediately.
One production detail worth stopping on: the vocals on “I’ve been known to share” stack into something that sounds like a room full of people agreeing with her. A small choice that gives the most loaded line in the song exactly the weight it needs.
The ending is what makes everything hold together. The boyfriend is in the ground. Carpenter and Ortega walk out of the funeral with domed cocktails, talking about him the way you talk about a disappointing restaurant. He was clingy. He had a lot of trauma. Ortega delivers “Very insecure” with the flat affect of someone reading a weather forecast. They share a moment, a kiss, and walk away together.
That image, two women leaving a man’s funeral without looking back, is also where the numbers land.
“Taste” spent nine consecutive weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart, the longest-running number one of 2024.
Combined with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” Carpenter accumulated 21 total weeks at number one across the year. She became the first artist in 71 years to spend 20-plus weeks at number one in a single calendar year, breaking the record for a female artist previously held by Olivia Newton-John since 1978.
The song about refusing to be erased outlasted everything.
Why It Holds Up
Some people leave a mark that does not fade when the relationship does. The jokes he tells, the way he moves, the things he knows how to do, those were learned somewhere. The new girlfriend inherits them without knowing where they came from. Carpenter is not trying to win him back. The bridge says so clearly. She has moved on and is turning the material into pop songs, which she told Paper is exactly what she does.
She put this one out first. Made it the opening track on the album. Stood in the video checking her makeup in a knife blade while everything around her caught fire.
That is the song. That is the attitude. And neither of them is asking to be liked.
“Taste” is the opening track of Short n’ Sweet, released August 2024 on Island Records.
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