Ready for another shot of “Espresso” from your favorite barista, Sabrina Carpenter?
Before Carpenter, 24, takes the stage at 2024’s Coachella festival, she decided to serve up a new single and a sun-tanned music video. After literally dumping a creep (and swiping his credit card), Carpenter enjoys a retro-themed beachside vacation, along with VIP service, mani-pedis and poolside service. Later, Carpenter lives out her full Gidget fantasy by dancing on a surfboard held up by a handful of hunks.
“Now he’s thinkin’ ’bout me every night / Oh, is it that sweet? I guess so,” Carpenter sings throughout the song. “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / That’s that me, espresso.”
However, the good times can’t last forever. Credit card fraud is indeed a crime, and the police arrive — with the dejected creep demanding his card back. Despite her best attempts to elude them, cops arrest Carpenter and throw her in the back of the car. In the closing moments, a different song plays through the police car’s loudspeaker, hinting that even more new music is on its way.
“Espresso” also displays Carpenter’s signature brand of humor, which she calls out in the lyrics. “I’m working late ’cause I’m a singer,” she sings with a bit of sarcasm. “Oh, he looks so cute wrapped ’round my finger / My twisted humor make him laugh so often / My honeybee, come and get this pollen.”
Ahead of its release, Carpenter spoke with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe about how the song came to be. “Weirdly enough, ended up writing [‘Espresso’] in France, and I think that that probably had a little bit of inspiration to how the song ended up feeling,” she said. “It just had that excitement and that energy of almost kind of traveling the world.”
Writing the song was “ a very, very quick process,” she recalled, adding, “From start to finish, I think that’s why you can kind of feel how fun it is. 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.”
Carpenter will get a chance to sing “Espresso” to the crowd when she helps kick off Coachella. She’s scheduled to perform on Friday, April 12, returning one week later on April 19. Carpenter’s set will begin at 6 p.m. PST on the Coachella stage, right after Young Miko and before Lil Uzi Vert. Peso Pluma will follow, with the day’s headliner, Lana Del Rey, set to play at 11:20 PST.
