Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega beat the absolute shit out of each other in "Taste" video

Death becomes Sabrina Carpenter. The pint-sized pop star’s brand of cheeky lyricism and sexy fun has swept the nation this summer, starting with the addictive “Espresso” and popping off with “Please Please Please.” On Friday, Carpenter released her highly anticipated new record Short N’ Sweet, accompanied by a new video for the album opener, “Taste.” In it, Carpenter finds herself in yet another love triangle—this time with Jenna Ortega—and this time she’s not going out without a fight. To the death. 

The “Taste” video is over-the-top gory, like, needs-a-parental-advisory-warning-before-the-video-starts gory. This perfectly suits scream queen Ortega’s macabre sensibility, but also surprisingly suits Carpenter, who clearly delights in getting a little subversive with her work. The two go after each other in increasingly upsetting ways, involving machetes, shotguns, and voodoo dolls, until finally Ortega accidentally murders their nondescript boyfriend with a chainsaw. That’s ’cause she was imagining kissing Carpenter, literalizing the lyric: “I heard you’re back together and if that’s true/You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you/If you want forever, I bet you do/Just know you’ll taste me too.” Of course, the video ends with the two ladies leaving their man’s funeral together, giggling: he was “Very insecure,” they agree. Laughing, Carpenter tells Ortega, “You kill me!”

The psychosexual transference of obsession from the man to his new girlfriend in “Taste” is a classic, previously explored by Little Big Town in their Grammy winning hit “Girl Crush,” where they sing about wanting to “taste her lips” because they “taste like you.” It’s also the subject of “Obsessed” by Olivia Rodrigo, who sings, “I’m so obsessed with your ex/I know she’s been asleep on my side of your bed/And I can feel it”—not unlike Carpenter noting in “Taste” that “Now I’m gone, but you’re still layin’/Next to me, one degree of separation.”

Rodrigo and Carpenter have long been linked ever since the latter was pegged as the “blonde girl who always made me doubt” in Rodrigo’s breakout hit “Drivers License.” Interestingly, “Taste” also has parallels to another of Rodrigo’s songs about their alleged love triangle. “Hе’s funny, now all his jokes hit different/Guеss who he learned that from?” Carpenter sings, just as Rodrigo once claimed “I made the jokes you tell to her when she’s with you” on her track “Deja Vu.” Now Carpenter is the one in Rodrigo’s position of the love triangle, but it’s the same old story. As the singer herself admits, “I’ve been there, done that once or twice/And singin’ ’bout it don’t mean I care/Yeah, I know I’ve been known to share.”