Taste

The Song That Speaks to the Wrong Person

Most breakup songs address the person who left. They plead, rage, mourn, or philosophize toward an absent lover. Sabrina Carpenter does something considerably more audacious on "Taste": she addresses not the man she lost, but the woman who replaced her. Not with cruelty, not with grief, and not with the trembling vulnerability that pop radio usually demands. With something closer to cheerful, bemused certainty, as if explaining a fact the other woman has not yet discovered.

That single reorientation is the engine of the entire song. "Taste" is not really a breakup song. It is a post-breakup power statement, delivered with the serenity of someone who already knows how the story ends.

The Summer That Made Everything

By the summer of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter was already having the year that pop stars dream about. "Espresso," the first single from her sixth studio album, had gone globally viral, spending months at the top of streaming charts and introducing her to audiences that had barely registered her name before. Then "Please Please Please" arrived, and the momentum only accelerated.

"Short n' Sweet" was released August 23, 2024, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 with 362,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. It topped charts in 18 countries and eventually earned six Grammy nominations, winning Best Pop Vocal Album at the 67th ceremony.^[2]

"Taste" arrived as the album's third track, immediately following "Espresso" and "Please Please Please." Recorded across multiple sessions in New York, France, the Bahamas, Maine, California, and Tennessee, the album was built in collaboration with songwriter Amy Allen (who co-wrote every track) and producers including Jack Antonoff, Julian Bunetta, Ian Kirkpatrick, and John Ryan.^[2]

The emotional raw material was closer to home. In early 2023, Carpenter had been briefly and publicly linked to pop star Shawn Mendes. Mendes subsequently made clear they were not dating and shortly after reunited with his former girlfriend. That sequence became widely discussed as the likely biographical engine behind "Taste," though neither Carpenter nor anyone connected to the song has confirmed the identity of the people involved.^[10]

Carpenter has been characteristically elliptical when asked about specific inspirations, but direct about her general approach. "I will write any song," she said in widely quoted remarks. "It doesn't mean I'll put it out, but I'll write it. I think the series of unfortunate events I've encountered in relationships are no secret to people who know me or think they know me."^[4]

Small Stature, Massive Footprint

One of the song's most striking moves is the way it weaponizes physical smallness. Carpenter is five feet tall, and the song leans into that fact with pointed irony: the narrator announces her diminutive height early on, then spends the rest of the track cataloguing the enormous impression she has left behind. There is something formally clever about this gap between what is stated and what is demonstrated.^[1]

The narrator's evidence of impact is deliberately physical and domestic: clothes that have gone missing (because they ended up at her place), habits and tastes that have been reshaped by her presence. The song argues that intimacy leaves fingerprints that do not wash off simply because a relationship ends. The new girlfriend, the narrator suggests, is inheriting a person who has already been rearranged by someone else.^[3]

This is a fairly sharp psychological observation. When we end relationships and begin new ones, we carry forward patterns, preferences, and reflexes that were shaped by previous partners. "Taste" makes that invisible truth visceral and specific. The rival is not imagined as some abstract threat; she is addressed as a concrete person who is about to discover that the man she is kissing has been kissed before, in a way that has not entirely faded.^[3]

Confidence Without Cruelty

What separates "Taste" from a simple revenge song is its tone. Carpenter is not angry. She is not wounded. The song has no real malice in it, and very little self-pity. What it has is a kind of dry amusement, as if the narrator finds the entire situation faintly absurd rather than devastating.^[4]

This is not a small distinction. Pop music is full of songs about being wronged. Far fewer pop songs manage to examine that same terrain from a position of genuine emotional security. Carpenter is not singing because she is hurt. She is singing because she knows something the other woman does not yet know, and she finds that knowledge more funny than painful.

The production reinforces this. "Taste" blends pop rock, country-tinged vocals, glam-pop production, and a hint of disco polish into something that feels fizzy and light. The guitars give it an edge, but the overall texture is playful.^[1]

This blend sits in interesting company. The song owes something to the tradition of witty, arch pop that runs from Carly Simon through early Taylor Swift, where emotional candor is delivered with a raised eyebrow rather than a broken voice. But Carpenter pushes further into confident swagger than most of her predecessors. The song is not asking for sympathy; it is offering an announcement.

The Music Video and the Horror-Comedy Escalation

Director Dave Meyers and Carpenter had the good sense to recognize that a song this tonally sharp needed a visual treatment that matched its energy. The music video, released alongside the album on August 23, 2024, stars Jenna Ortega as the romantic rival and Rohan Campbell as the contested man.^[5]

Rather than staging a literal interpretation of the song's premise, the video escalates into horror-comedy: Carpenter and Ortega spend the runtime competing through increasingly elaborate and gruesome acts of violence against each other, all while the man in the middle remains cheerfully oblivious. The visual references are deliberate and dense, nodding to "Death Becomes Her" (1992), "Kill Bill," "Psycho," and "Ginger Snaps," among others.^[5]

The video became a viral moment in its own right. It extended the song's reach considerably, giving it a visual identity that matched the song's own refusal to take the rivalry entirely seriously. By treating the love triangle as horror-comedy rather than drama, the video underlined what the song already argued: this is not a tragedy. It is an absurdity, and Carpenter is in on the joke.

Chart Dominance and Cultural Moment

"Taste" performed extraordinarily well commercially. It peaked at number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and reached number one in Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. On the UK Singles Chart, it spent nine weeks at number one, making it the longest-running number one single of all of 2024 in Britain.^[6]

The chart milestones accumulated in ways that invited historical comparisons. Carpenter held three simultaneous top-ten hits on the Hot 100 for eight consecutive weeks, placing her in company alongside The Beatles, Drake, Justin Bieber, and 50 Cent as the only acts to have done so in their respective eras.^[8]

"Taste" surpassed one billion streams on Spotify and earned 4x Platinum certification in the United States, 5x Platinum in Canada, and 6x Platinum in Australia.^[1]

A New Feminist Pop Grammar

Critics and cultural commentators read "Taste" within a broader argument about how female pop artists handle the subject of rivalry and romantic loss. Traditionally, the "other woman" narrative in pop music places women either as victims or as villains. "Taste" does neither.^[7]

Carpenter addresses the rival woman directly but without hostility. The song is not an attack. It is more like a knowing aside, one woman speaking candidly to another about a situation they both share, even if one of them does not yet know all the details. There is a strange intimacy in that framing. The men in these dynamics often pass through pop songs as agents of heartbreak; here, the man is almost a supporting character, and the real relationship is between two women who have both been involved with him.^[7]

Cultural analysts positioned this alongside Carpenter's broader approach to creative control on "Short n' Sweet": working with predominantly female collaborators (including co-writer Amy Allen), maintaining her own creative vision, and presenting female sexuality through her own lens rather than one filtered through the male gaze.^[7]

The Universal Inside the Specific

An alternative, and perhaps deeper, reading of "Taste" is that its apparent specificity (the named measurements, the described objects, the direct address) is actually the source of its universality. The song is almost certainly rooted in a specific biographical episode that many listeners will try to decode. But the dynamic it describes is not specific at all.

Anyone who has been in a relationship that ended because someone chose to return to a previous partner knows the particular sting involved. It is not quite the same as being left for someone new. It carries an additional layer of ambiguity, because the person who left is, in some sense, admitting that they could not fully commit to moving forward. The new girlfriend in "Taste" is not really a rival in the traditional sense; she is a reminder that the narrator was never quite finished with, in the most literal way.

Carpenter's genius is converting that specific, slightly humiliating situation into something that reads as triumphant. The song does not linger in the wound. It pivots to the one thing the narrator can genuinely claim: she was there first, she left a mark, and that mark is not going anywhere.^[4]

Conclusion: What Lingers

"Taste" endures because it captures something that almost no pop song bothers to articulate: the strange, complicated pride of having mattered deeply to someone who ultimately chose someone else. Most songs process that pain through sadness or anger. Carpenter processes it through confidence, which turns out to be a far more interesting emotional register.

The song does not ask for validation. It does not hope for the man to come back. It is not even particularly interested in him. Its target is something more abstract: the acknowledgment that intimacy leaves residue, that being fully present with someone is not something that simply evaporates when a relationship ends.

In an era of social media performance and hypervisible breakups, "Taste" offers a different posture. You do not need to make someone regret losing you. You do not need to become unbothered. You can simply know your own worth, acknowledge that you left something real behind, and move forward without diminishing what happened.

The song became a cultural touchstone in 2024 precisely because that message resonated far beyond any specific gossip about who it was written about. "Taste" is a song about self-possession in the aftermath of loss, and for a few months in the summer and autumn of 2024, it was the sound of an entire generation of listeners deciding they were done apologizing for taking up space.^[9]