Portrait Of An Artist: Blondshell
Having ricocheted into the spotlight with her immediate 2023 debut, Blondshell has since cemented herself as one of guitar music’s most vital new voices. Now, on second outing ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, Sabrina Teitelbaum is dialling up the honesty and letting her guard down.
If telling it like it is were a sport, Sabrina Teitelbaum could have won the world title with her debut. Composed of bracing college-rock confessionals confronting grief, addiction, social anxiety, and a series of spectacularly unfulfilling relationships, her eponymous outing as Blondshell spared nobody, and was rightly hailed one of the standout records of 2023. To listen was to feel intimately acquainted with the LA-based artist’s internal world - to be thrust into a parasocial relationship, simply by virtue of pressing play. Preparing to meet in person this morning – in the lobby of an East London hotel – it’s tough to shake the idea of Teitelbaum as an open book. The reality, of course, is far less simplistic. Though warm and engaging company, the 27-year-old asserts firm boundaries when it comes to discussing certain personal specifics, ultimately underscoring the function of songwriting for her as a standalone outlet for unguarded expression. Certainly, that’s true of her lauded second album, ‘If You Asked for a Picture’.
Thematically, the 12-track collection could almost be the prequel to her debut; it finds Teitelbaum pushing further back in time to excavate the roots of her trauma and unearthing uneven power dynamics, familial tension, body dysmorphia, and destructive behavioural loops in the process. But where previously Teitelbaum felt inclined to offer a narrative overview of events, this time she zooms in on specific imagery in the hope of delivering emotional truth.
The album itself is named after a line from ‘Dogfish’, the 1983 poem by Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver. In it, Oliver wrestles with the idea of autobiography and how much of one’s self to share with her audience, asserting: “You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway, I don’t want to tell it.” As a songwriter used to treating listeners as confidantes, these words hit Teitelbaum hard, shifting her creative approach in the process. “I’ve always struggled with this idea of over-explaining things in the hope of somebody understanding everything about me,” she reflects. “The truth is that sometimes [that approach] does the opposite of what you want. Sometimes it’s more effective to just give people a little picture of what you’re talking about and let them connect the dots, than it is to try to teach them everything about you.”
Consequently, the album is punctuated by a succession of vivid snapshots that immerse the listener deep in the action. ‘Event Of A Fire’ is a case in point: using a 4am hotel fire drill on tour as a jumping off point, the track stitches together a series of repressed, sleep-deprived reflections, ultimately painting a portrait of Teitelbaum’s fraught mental state. Set to a gradual melodic crescendo, it’s a stream of consciousness offering signifying emotional burnout, Teitelbaum explains. “If you have to have a job, interact with people or function in society in any capacity, you have to repress things that happened 20 years ago – things that happened yesterday – simply to go about your day. So I think a lot of the music is about what’s happening under the surface all the time.
“For example, as a girl you’re told your whole life that you have to be a certain weight and your body has to look a certain shape. I would struggle to try to give you an example of one woman that I know who hasn’t been affected by that deeply. You can’t escape that expectation, and it’s exhausting pretending like it doesn’t affect you every single day.” ‘Model Rockets’ develops this idea further, lyrically exploring the toxic parallels drawn between depression-related weight gain and personal failure (“I got big and pigeonholed / I watched tv shows / I lost friends and my collar bone”).
As per its predecessor, ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ was recorded at Sunset Sound in LA with Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Amaarae). But where ‘Blondshell’ was largely centred around grungy guitars and the scratchy acoustics of ‘90s alt-rock, album two seeks out a wider palette of sound, ranging from Beatles-esque balladry (‘Model Rockets’) and jangling indie (‘Toy’) to anthemic alt-rock (‘Arms’). “I wanted this record to feel like there was a lot more breadth,” Teitelbaum says. “It’s not just big raw songs or ballads – I wanted to fill in more space.”
Likewise, where previously she had looked to Interpol, The Cure and Hole’s ‘Live Through This’ for production inspiration, this time she gravitated towards more alpha touch points. Top of the list were the FM-friendly rock of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Californication’ and Queens of the Stoneage’s ‘Rated R’, as she gravitated towards John Frusicante’s sonorous guitar tones and Josh Homme’s production muscle, respectively. You can trace the influence of the latter through the satisfying crunch of ‘T+A’’s chorus, while the former informs the solo guitar at the climax of ‘Change’.
As an artist who’s never been afraid to call out patriarchal bullshit, it feels a bold choice for Teitelbaum to select two such cartoonishly masculine references. “I was born in ‘97,” she shrugs. “As a kid, I had Guitar Hero, and they had all the [RHCP] hits so I remember my friends coming over and us playing ‘Scar Tissue.’” Rather than an attempt to subvert those tropes, then, this second album is about reconnecting with her roots (although she does concede that “subconsciously, as a woman in those spaces, it’s nice to feel I have this armour of really heavy music”).
And yet, that’s not to say the opposite sex get an easy ride on ‘If You Asked For A Picture’. ‘Man’ is a particularly wince-inducing dramatisation of a relationship with a significantly older man, which finds Teitelbaum wryly weighing up the pros and cons of their time together (“I got a lot of free rein and cocaine / And pretty clothes and shifty goals”; “I didn’t get deposed”). Speaking on the song’s inspiration, she explains: “Just by nature of growing up in New York, I was exposed to too much too young. As a young girl, it’s so easy to be sexualised by older men and you don’t realise how fucked up that is until you’re older. Now I can look back and be like, ‘Even if it’s legal, that’s gross’. There’s a part in the song where I’m like, ‘I just wanted to cancel’. I had that experience a number of times, where I would think that I craved that kind of attention from men, or to be in those spaces, only to realise that really [I was] just a kid and I wanted to go home. I think that sums up the album, in a way.”
Family proves another key preoccupation - specifically, the unique tensions that exist between mothers and daughters. The soaring chorus of ‘23’s A Baby’ is centred around the reproach “Why’d you have a baby?”, while the middle eight sees Teitelbaum admitting: “I said something when I was 10 that I’d take back / But you deserve some hell from me while I figure out if you’re the enemy.” ‘What’s Fair’ follows a similar theme, chiding her mum for being lenient to the point of negligence and for negatively commenting on her body, before conceding: “I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mom.”
Teitelbaum refuses to be drawn on the details of their relationship in real life, but jokes “it’s my villain origin story, like when Batman becomes evil.” Equally, she has empathy for anyone attempting the impossible job of parenting. “Even if you have the most healthy, normal relationship with your parents, there’s literally nobody on earth that will do a perfect job as a parent. And I think everybody’s romantic relationships, friendships, and work relationships are informed by the blueprint you get from your family. So I think it would be impossible for me to talk about any of this stuff and not have [my parents] come up on the album.”
Also off limits today is any discussion of her OCD (“People just love to pathologise”), though these long-standing struggles are interwoven into the fabric of ‘Thumbtack’ and ‘Toy’. What she will speak on, however, is her life-long hunger for control. “I mean, body image, addiction, it’s all the same thing,” she sighs. “I think seeking control is a way to try to cope with the fact that there’s gonna be pain in life and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it.”
This idea of wresting control ties back into how much Teitelbaum chooses to share with others. “I don’t really filter anything when I’m writing, but I was thinking more about real life interactions… Like, you meet someone at a party and you’re just trying to make a connection with somebody new as a friend. In any sort of social interaction, I’m asking ‘how much of myself do I want to share? How much of my life do I want to describe to them?’” Since getting sober five years ago, she’s had to get comfortable feeling exposed. “If you’re sober, social anxiety is usually part of the package,” she grins. “Because usually the reason you drank in the first place was to cover the anxiety you felt. But practising using that muscle makes it much easier, depending on the situation.”
Likewise, accepting culpability is a significant part of that healing process. On ‘Two Times’, she owns her role in a toxic relationship, admitting “You try hard to make me yours / But once you get me I get bored / I’ll come back if you put me down two times”. Likewise, ‘Thumbtack’ sees her selfishly prolonging a doomed romance simply as a diversion from inner turmoil: “You distract from what’s worse so I will let you keep a ball chain on my leg / Keep fucking with my head / ‘Cause it’s not as bad as what I do to myself”.
It takes strength to show such vulnerability, but for Teitelbaum it’s a risk that has always come with huge creative rewards. “I think if you write about stuff that you feel really ashamed of – which is all that I seem to do – then you get a real sense of healing from other people identifying with what you’ve said. I mean, it’s always a really pleasant surprise to have other people feel the same way, because the music’s so fucked up there is always the possibility that people could say, ‘that’s too dark, that’s too heavy…’”
Coming off the back of two years of near-solid touring - and with this year’s packed-out live calendar including turns at Mad Cool, Pohoda, and opening for Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park - the appetite for Teitelbaum’s searing songwriting is most definitely there. Summer 2025, it seems, is the season of brutal candour, bold realisations, and Blondshell.
‘If You Asked For A Picture’ is out now via Partisan Records.
Blondshell will play Mad Cool Festival, which takes place from 10th-13th July 2025 in Villaverde, Madrid. Find out more and get tickets at madcoolfestival.es.
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