After dropping an iconic self-titled debut album in 2023, Blondshell’s Sabrina Teitelbaum has been busy with one main thing: “Tour. So much tour,” she says. “The last two years have been so cool. The whole reason I wanted to be a musician and put out albums is to play shows, and I’ve spent the last couple of years doing that. I’m very excited to do it again.”
The LA-based musician grew up in Manhattan and has revelled in discovering new territories between the two coasts and beyond, playing to her quickly established fan base at every opportunity. Performing from a young age and originally a pop star in the making, Teitelbaum got used to indie-rock being something to explore on her own rather than it being an interest to bond with other people over. Once you’ve got songs like ‘Olympus’ and ‘Salad’ under your belt, though, that is inevitably going to change.
“Now, I share it with anyone and everyone around me, which is awesome,” she beams. “You can talk to everybody who listens to the same shit; it’s really nice.” Widespread critical acclaim, an audience latching onto every sharply written lyric, and an array of big performances – SXSW, Lollapalooza, Jimmy Fallon – deservedly followed, although Sabrina highlights that, “it’s still an indie project that’s steadily grown at a pace that I can understand and feel comfortable with.”
For someone who cites ‘Sepsis’, a track indicating a potent lack of self-worth in early life, as the most appropriate summarisation of her first full-length release, this validation could become overwhelming. A quick scan of the lyrics to her follow-up record, ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, will instead reveal a sincere attitude of self-reflection, albeit with the same biting sense of humour.
“I’ve always been trying to have more acceptance of myself and the stuff around me because I honestly think that it makes life better if you know yourself and are okay with things,” she ponders. “On the first album, I felt like I kept running into the same personal wall. I kept feeling like, I’m dating these same kinds of people and finding myself in these horrible situations over and over and over again. I wasn’t finding myself in that position when it came to making this album. I was able to look under the surface of that. If you have any sort of complicated past or disorganisation in your childhood, it really comes up in dating and relationships, in the kind of people you choose for yourself. With this album, I was looking more at why I was doing all that stuff.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of ‘I’m gonna kill you’ on the album”
Writing the nine-track ‘Blondshell’ LP came with few burdens as a release no one was expecting, never mind awaiting with bated breath – that lack of pressure allowed an intimate insight into Teitelbaum’s musings, which might otherwise have gone unsaid or at the very least undiscovered. Fortunately, she was able to pick things right back up without missing a step.
“Most of the time when I’m writing, I’m still thinking that no one’s going to hear this; I’m not putting it out. For me, that’s the only way that I can say the stuff I have to say. Everything’s so personal in all these songs, and it doesn’t feel so vulnerable to share that with strangers because there’s a layer of anonymity. The thing is, when you put songs out, everyone in your life hears them: your friends, your family, people you’ve dated then written songs about… If I were to think about that while writing, I don’t think I would be able to write. I turn that part of my mind off.”
When she got back into the Sunset Sound studio with her recording band and close friend slash producer Yves Rothman, she was even able to ramp things up. “I was aware of stuff that I would’ve wanted to do but didn’t have the time for previously,” she explains. “There were things this time around where I knew going in, ‘I’m going to be more intentional about this part of the process’. Vocal harmonies, for example. On the first album, I’d be recording lead vocals and think on the spot, I’m gonna add something on this line. This time, I went into the recording process knowing that I wanted vocal harmonies to be a big thing on the record; I want it to be a big part of the whole sound.”
That ambition to expand her soundscapes transforms the Blondshell sound from one fairly rooted in indie-rock to a boundless singer-songwriter dipping toes in folk and light country but not afraid to thrash around either. “I had more time to make this record so it’s more shaded in. Rather than black and white, rock song or ballad and nothing in between, I was a little braver with the kinds of song that I made. I put out a song last week [‘Two Times’], which is a really acoustic song. If that were a song on the first record I would’ve wanted, needed, a wall of guitars, a big solo somewhere… This time, it was more brave for me personally to take the step to not cover up the lyrics or my voice with all these guitars. I still class it as a rock album and there are rock songs on the album, but there are more moments where I don’t need to hide myself behind production.”
‘Two Times’ specifically assesses Sabrina’s comfortability, or lack thereof, with finding a partner who is willing to love her in a whole-hearted way, without doubt or difficulty. “How bad does it have to hurt to count?” she questions in the chorus. This kind of inward finger-pointing manifests across much of the strong tracklist. “Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of ‘I’m gonna kill you’ on the album,” she smiles. “Most of them are big rock songs, but there needs to be space to show who I am as a whole person and not just this one side of myself.”
When some artists hit it big with their first record, often a collection of greatest hits gathered over their early years, the ground over that infatuating hill falls out quickly beneath them, and this can summon a need to reinvent, to prove they can be more and do more. That’s not quite the Blondshell trajectory, though, and with ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, she defiantly steers in the opposite direction.
“Something that I’ve been aware of for a while is that there’s a lot of pressure on women artists to reinvent themselves every album. You have to come back a new person with a new message, a new look and all that. I don’t see that happening for men, it’s not the expectation,” she observes. “Maybe that was in the back of my mind; I don’t need to try to be something different or create something different. I write songs at home so I’m just continuing to do that and then make an album when I feel like the material is ready. I’ll figure out what the album is about while I’m making it.”
In terms of continuation, opening track ‘Thumbtack’ eases us in with a song written in the very immediate aftermath of her first recording sessions. “That’s why I chose that song order; I wanted it to feel like picking up where we left things. I didn’t want to put an acoustic song at the beginning of the album, but REM did it, so it must be fine. Obviously, it’s impossible to pick up completely because of time, but I knew the songs would be different and the record would come out differently from the first one by the nature of that, so I kept everything else that I could the same. Same producer, band, and studio – I wanted to feel comfortable.”
Before any of that sonic progression happened, Sabrina went back home to write in isolation and once again found solace in literature. With the birth of this project coinciding with her discovery of the refusal of women to minimise their emotions in unapologetic memoirs, this time it was poetry that connected most, specifically American writer Mary Oliver’s 1986 piece Dogfish.
“There are a lot of lines that stick out, but the thing that spoke to me most was that there’s so much compassion for other people and how people’s personalities develop,” she recalls. “There’s a line about how nobody is ever kind or mean for a simple reason. Everybody’s been through so much that has slowly influenced the person that they are, and there’s always a reason for their actions. That’s such a compassionate way to look at people around you and I really loved that.”
“I also loved the part where she was like: I don’t need to explain to you every single thing that I’ve been through. It’s just about surviving sometimes. I really liked that. If you try to explain every bit of your life to somebody, it’s impossible. Nobody is ever going to be able to see everything through your perspective. You’re just giving a snapshot of your life and what it’s like for somebody trying to make it through; that’s the most important thing. It’s the same concept when it comes to making an album; you’re showing somebody a tiny little picture of your life at that moment.”
Rather than thinking directly about the listener and perhaps the picture they were asking for, it was instead a self-focused proposal. “My life has been dogged by this sense of trying to show somebody everything that I am thinking in order to have a connection with them. I have to accept that that’s not totally possible, and differences are what create connections in people. Thinking about relationships in my life, if I’m talking to you, then it’s okay for me to just give a little snippet of what’s going on inside; we can still make a connection through that.”
“I didn’t want to put an acoustic song at the beginning of the album, but REM did it, so it must be fine”
Although these delicate ideas are often channelled through raucous influences like Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins – “It’s empowering for me to use sonic references that feel reserved for men,” she has stated – there are also lighter, more traditionally Californian touchstones such as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queens of the Stone Age. These jagged, hefty edges only accentuate the soft analytical core of Blondshell, toying with gender expectations and laying an intriguing thread across ‘If You Asked For A Picture’.
“The way I fell in love with music was listening to really detailed female singer-songwriters,” she explains. “Fiona Apple is my favourite writer ever. She writes the most beautiful, heartbreaking lyrics. I learnt how to sing listening to Amy Winehouse and Adele, all these big powerhouse vocalists. That stuff is always going to be the music at my core; I love it so much. When I’m writing alone, that is how I think about music. When I’m in the studio, I want to have that heavier guitar paired with it.”
‘What’s Fair’ was the first single from this record and hits lightly towards that, seemingly critiquing parental direction and her own reaction to it. Deeper cut ‘23’s A Baby’ also hints at similar themes, but Sabrina isn’t willing to point to a clear answer for any track. “Both of those songs are about a lot of different types of relationships, not one or any specific people. For any song on this record, I didn’t sit down and think about writing about this thing or this thing. It’s like if you have a dream – all those images that come up aren’t really chosen, they arrive as a stream of consciousness. That’s how I see my writing.”
You could say those two cuts are less ‘dear mum, fuck you’, and more, ‘here are a whole mess of feelings that may well have started in my childhood yet also linger somewhere deep in my mind even today’. Slightly more succinctly phrased, as one can imagine.
Either way, these conversations are absolutely ones that did not leave the page. “Most of the stuff in there, I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to someone else. The way that I write is the stuff that I bottle up, building pressure, needs to come out – that’s why it ends up in song. I only write when I feel like I really have to say something. I wouldn’t be able to write so much about stuff that I was actually comfortable saying in real life.”
It’s convenient, then, that many of these dialogues are self-directed. Take track nine, the moody, riff-centric ‘Toy’. “Somebody needs to get fucked or get a toy,” she blares. “’Toy’ for me is about trying to control everything, being obsessive compulsive, and trying to find joy and searching more for joy than control in your life. The whole time it’s like, wow, somebody needs to chill the fuck out.”
“There are so many specific things there and throughout the album that I’m using to try to describe what it’s like to be a woman at this age experiencing all this stuff and trying to figure it out,” she divulges. “Something that came up a lot on this album was body image. In part of that song, I talk about how it’s chill for guys to have a belly when they’re kids, and they don’t care about it, but for a girl, from the time that you’re pretty young, you’re taught what your body is supposed to look like. I’m talking about things that I wish I could stop trying to control or learn how to stop controlling.”
“Part of me still sits at home in a panic over fifteen pounds,” she sombrely sings on ‘Event of A Fire’. This record benefits hugely from Sabrina’s age – at 27, she can make this acute commentary that reflects on the mistakes and experiences of her past (recent and less so) selves. But really, those people very much live on.
“At some point every day, that part of me exists and is actively speaking. Acknowledging the part of myself that is still a 17-year-old girl is so important. It’s so much more important to address that she exists than it would be to pretend that she wasn’t there. There’s stuff that you’ll hear yourself say and go, ‘Oh wait, that voice is me when I was 16’. Acknowledging that that’s okay, she’s allowed to hang out – even if she can’t be the voice of reason in my head all the time – has been really important for me.”
When she asks herself “am I burnt out”, it feels heavy not only from the perspective of an artist but just a human living in the 21st Century. “It would be so awesome if you could go to therapy and everything was fixed immediately,” she jests, but there is obvious awareness of the ongoing process and the lack of ease with which these excellent, exposing narrations are permitted. “Sometimes just thinking about that stuff can make you feel burnt out. If you’re writing about it, then it comes up and out of you, but everybody lives with that stuff. Everybody experiences that kind of burnout, but I don’t hear everybody talking about it.”
With a stable relationship, consistent therapy and blossoming career, Blondshell is far from the end of her evolution and as such, so are her stories. ‘Model Rocket’ closes the album on a deliberately unresolved note. “Coming up with some sort of ending for the album would’ve been so disingenuous because there was no final answer, and is no final answer, to anything here. Now we have a happy ending! Well, there is no ending, so it would’ve been weird to make one up.”
On her own journey of discovery, she sings, “Life may have been happening elsewhere / And I don’t know what I want anymore.” Sabrina may be putting a lot of effort into figuring things out and documenting it for our benefit, but ultimately, the goal is ever-moving and will never be reached.
Teitelbaum stumbled onto this sentiment while reading Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, which dissects a metaphor that originated in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. “She’s talking about this fig tree,” Sabrina recounts. “This person is looking up at this fig tree and spots one fig, which is themselves in a future with one job and one life. Then they see another fig which is a different path, and maybe they want that one instead. They’re surrounded by different versions of their life, but then they find themselves starving at the foot of the tree because they couldn’t choose one.”
“When I was writing, I was struggling with this idea of there being so many possibilities of what your life could look like, and if you choose one thing, you’re inherently giving up the other options. That is the case with so many parts of your life, you can only spend your time on so many things. When I read that, I thought, holy shit, that is the most beautiful and accurate way to put that. That is the same idea that ‘Model Rocket’ is exploring. It’s so crazy to read something, listening to a song or watch a movie that’s about the exact thing you’re feeling at that moment. I was shocked.”
Listeners new and old are sure to find the same affirmation across ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, and this is the same feeling Blondshell herself is continuously seeking in the art around her. “It’s a sense of connection because you know someone is going through something similar to you, or expressing an idea that you had but felt embarrassed or ashamed to tell other people. I try to give an accurate snapshot of stuff I’m dealing with. My hope is that someone has fun listening to it, and feels a little less shame on any of these subjects. After all, it’s not so weird to have these thoughts.” ■
Taken from the April 2025 issue of Dork. Blondshell’s album ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ is out 2nd May.
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