Sabrina Carpenter’s Summer 2024 ins and outs list has arrived in the form of her sugary-sweet, intensely caffeinated new single “Espresso.” Feeling desperate and caring too much about the boy blowing up your phone? That’s out. Sending your “give a fucks” on vacation and taking your own to get sun-kissed and pampered on that same boy’s gold card? That’s definitely in.
In case any instructions were unclear in either text or song, Carpenter teamed up with director Dave Meyers to craft a step-by-step guide in music video form.
The “Espresso” visual opens with the singer tossing a bothersome boy off of a boat and leaving him to swim back to shore. It’s less bloody than the gym brawls and elevator decapitations from her “Feather” music video, but credit card theft is her crime of choice this time around. While he’s paddling, she’s swiping away and soaking up the sun. After Carpenter and her girls finish their shopping spree, they sip fruity drinks from lounge chairs with beach attendants at their beck and call.
And just when she thinks the day can’t get any sweeter, she spots six oiled-up boys hanging around a vintage Mustang parked in the sand. “Too bad your ex don’t do it for ya / Walked in and dream came trued it for ya / Soft skin and I perfumed it for ya,” Carpenter sings with a wink. The bubble of her fantasy doesn’t even pop when the boy she ditched in the water makes it back to land and points her out to the local police. She’s still giggly and beaming as she’s being arrested, even kicking her stilettos up in the backseat of a cop car.
“Weirdly enough, we ended up writing this song in France, and I think that that probably had a little bit of inspiration to how the song ended up feeling. It just had that excitement and that energy of almost kind of traveling the world,” Carpenter told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was something really exciting about the fact that there was so much personality throughout the entire song, because those are the ones that are really, really fun to sing live with a crowd. Those are the ones that people, I think when they don’t know my music or who I am or anything, they can just tune in to a single song and kind of leave with a better idea of my sense of humor.”
