A Snapshot of Blondshell

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BLONDSHELL’S NEW ALBUM IS IN no way a sonic shift from her celebrated self-titled debut; instead If You Asked For A Picture is a cohesive follow-up, the subsequent chapter in a book or the next snapshot tucked away in a scrapbook. And that consistency—the feeling that we’re picking up with Blondshell just where she left off, like when you meet up with an old friend years later and nothing has changed—is what makes this such a beautiful and stirring record.

As Los Angeles-based indie rocker Sabrina Teitelbaum, better known as Blondshell, tells me, “I just don’t really feel like there has to be such a departure every time you make an album. I wanted any sort of departure to be in the songs and in the writing, but I really trust all the people that I work with, so I felt like, ‘Let’s just do the same shit again, but with different songs about different things.’” And so she did just that, reuniting with producer Yves Rothman—whose other credits include Sunflower Bean, girl in red, Courtney Love, Eartheater, and Miya Folick—in order to foster that sense of musical continuity.

“There wasn’t really a time where I was like, ‘I am done with the first album, I’m now going to start writing the second album,’” Teitelbaum elaborates over Zoom. Her process involves penning “batches of songs” rather than writing every day. The tracks that later became If You Asked For A Picture were written in dribs and drabs after Blondshell was released to critical acclaim in April of 2023. She sports the same grungy, casually confident sound as on Blondshell’s first LP—chunky, reverb-soaked guitar and stolid bass grounding the melody as Teitelbaum’s feelings barrel at you through her charged, arrestingly direct lyrics—but something’s changed. R.E.M., Fiona Apple, Bloc Party, and the robust, swaggering guitar of Interpol and 2000s-era Red Hot Chili Peppers all serve as sonic touchstones, much like before, however, her critical eye has turned inward. “With the first album, there was a lot of just like, ‘I am finding myself in a bad position. That sucks.’ And this is more like, ‘Perhaps, why? Why am I finding myself here, and what could I maybe do differently?’” Teitelbaum tells me.

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“I think that anytime somebody makes an album, it’s just a little snapshot of the things that they’re thinking about and going through at that period in time, which I think is really exciting for when I’m 60, and I can look back and be like, ‘Oh, that’s how I was.’ I can remember how I was feeling when I was 24, 26, or whatever,” she continues.

Though she explores thorny, difficult topics on If You Asked for a Picture—from being sexualized as a teenager to her mother’s unwanted critiques of her appearance—Teitelbaum enjoyed the experience of recording the album, in part because she’d already done it once before and felt more comfortable in the studio. “At least for me, I don’t have to be thinking about the subject matter of the lyrics,” she says. “I can just be like, ‘How do I want this to sound?’ There’s just a lot more room for hanging out with people you like, and it’s always exciting to hear shit come to life.”

Relationships remain one of the central themes of Teitelbaum’s songwriting, much like on Blondshell, whether she’s talking about a romantic partner or a relative. “Your relationship with your parents is the blueprint for every relationship you have afterwards. So if there’s anything complicated or dysfunctional about that, it reveals itself like 20 years later,” she says of her familial focus in certain songs. “What’s Fair” and “23’s a Baby” both zero in on maternal connections in all of their confusing, overwhelming reality. “What’s Fair” blazes bright on the chorus as she reflects on her late mom’s mistakes, both cutting her slack (“It’s not rare,” she says of parental fuck-ups) and not (“Doesn’t make it less depressing”). She’s got every reason to be hurt (“You’d want me to be famous so you could live by proxy / You always had a reason to comment on my body”), but her shifted perspective is evident, as Teitelbaum makes space to sympathize with her mother. “You’re not a perfect person / Something’s always wrong / But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mom,” she admits, and that final line cuts for any woman (myself included) who’s said regretful things to her mom.

“23’s A Baby” finds Blondshell in the same push-and-pull between blame and forgiveness, but this time her acerbic wit is sharpened to an even finer point. She equates dealing with intergenerational trauma to being forced to tidy up after someone else, and it’s one of those incredibly lucid moments that is sure to stick with listeners: “Cleaning up your mess / No cause no explanation.” “[‘23’s A Baby’] exists in this drum-and-guitar place that we don’t really have on the other songs,” she says of the melody. “So I felt excited to have it. With the last album, both lyrically and musically, all the songs were kind of either at one end of the spectrum or the other, and this was something that was more in a gray area and more in a middle ground.”

Opener “Thumbtack,” meanwhile, introduces the album on an acoustic note—an exciting departure, since Blondshell was more in the wall-of-sound vein. Sam Stewart and Joe Kennedy’s gently plucked guitars amble through, their serenity belying the fact that Teitelbaum wrote the song “loosely about control and how that shows up in the people you choose to be in relationships with,” as well as about her OCD. Her paramour here is an annoyance at best, harmful at worst—“a thumbtack in my side, a dog bite,” she sings earnestly, imploringly—but their infuriating version of love is preferable to self-loathing (“Keep fucking with my head / Cuz it’s not as bad as what I do to myself”). Teitelbaum dissects the “difference between either something being romanticized or something being sexualized” on the sunshine-dappled yet deeply melancholic and lightly Rolling Stones-inspired “T&A.” This is Blondshell at her most diaristic; it feels like we’ve clandestinely peeked in her journal as she sings “I said if you stop drinking maybe I could find you attractive” and wonders: “Why don’t the good ones love me?” The song’s most emotionally piercing lyric, though, arrives when her familial and romantic relationships cross over: “I can’t tell my sister we’re together / She knows about that fight remember / You got scared and changed your voice / Turned right from a man into a boy.”

“T&A” is followed by the chunky twang of electric guitar on “Arms” which hangs heavy in the air, reflecting the emotional weight of being in a relationship where you feel the need to save a partner because they don’t seem willing to save themselves. “I don’t wanna be your mom / But you’re not strong enough,” Teitelbaum confesses as the song starts. “I felt like [this song is] that sort of fight about how much is my responsibility, how much of somebody else’s well being is my responsibility—or even if I want it to be my responsibility, how much of it can be? What am I really powerless over, and what am I able to do for somebody else?” she explains.

“Two Times” and “Change” are sister songs, linked by Teitelbaum’s questioning of the omnipresent idea that conflict is necessary for a relationship to thrive. She’s a big fan of reality TV—Real Housewives of New York, Survivor, Love Is Blind, Love Island—a genre that revolves around interpersonal tension, but is far from the only area of media feeding audiences the message that conflict and passion are one and the same. “I think a lot of the stuff I grew up seeing, movies and TV and pop songs and all that stuff, everything’s just about conflict. So if you find yourself without a ton of conflict, you’re like, ‘Oh, what’s missing? There must be something that’s wrong here,’” Teitelbaum says.

“Two Times” is the folk-inflected response to that question—nothing is missing, and love “can just be chill. It doesn’t have to be crazy. It can be solid.” “How bad does it have to hurt to count?” she asks on the chorus after praising her loving, dependable partner (“You’d be a good dad / You carried me to the bed / You carried me to the car / When I got sick”). Sometimes admitting you’re happy—and admitting that your instinct to seek out conflict runs counter to that aim—can feel like the scariest thing. After all, you have something to lose; it’s like you’re jinxing things. “I think sometimes when I have a song that feels vulnerable, I’ll want to add walls of guitars and drums so that it feels kind of masked,” Teitelbaum reflects. “I feel proud of the fact that with [Two Times], I was able to be like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna let it stand on its own. We’re just gonna have a mandolin and an acoustic guitar and piano and bass, and that’s it.’”

BUT OUR INSTINCTS CAN OVERTAKE our better judgment; “Change” sees her giving into that desire to create conflict. “That’s one of those songs where I’m sort of like, ‘Maybe I’m the villain in some ways,’” Teitelbaum tells me. Hesitant piano at the start gives way to moody guitar and shaken percussion. She taps into a more haunting sound on “Change,” channeling Neil Young & Crazy Horse or the hypnotic groove of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” “When I feel bad I bring it back and leave it all at your door,” she divulges near the end of the song over chugging guitar, before crying out plaintively, “I’m sorry for changing.”

While these songs are emotionally frank and Blondshell’s lyrics are gripping in their candor, the path to their creation isn’t quite as straightforward as you’d think. When she describes her songwriting process, I’m vaguely reminded of the theological concept of predestination—the idea that everything will play out the way God has decided it will. “I sort of think that you have no choice about what you write,” she tells me, later expanding: “The way that I write is really subconscious… I’ve noticed it’s sort of like how in dreams, you’ll have just images that come out. And it can be kind of like that. The other day I was writing, and I realized that I write a lot about images that I have associated with my grandma’s house. My grandma has a lemon tree, and I wrote about this lemon tree, and I didn’t realize until afterwards, and then it’s like a dream: You wake up and piece it together.”

Take, for example, the fact that “Arms” contains the line “You had a lot of sex and rage”; Teitelbaum had been reading works by the late Eve Babitz (a fellow L.A. artist) while writing the album, and though she wasn’t planning to reference the writer’s 1979 novel Sex & Rage, the title just slipped in there. The final track of If You Asked For A Picture, the sweetly dreamy “Model Rockets,” returns to her grandmother’s house in Los Angeles: “And I don’t know what I want anymore / Glued a rose to the top of the door but it fell,” she sings, feeling as unanchored as the Post-It that she and her siblings had placed on her grandma’s door frame, which had miraculously stayed attached for over a decade, only to fall off after all those years. “I never would have sat down and been like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write about that Post-It that we put outside my grandma’s house.’ It just came up, because I think that’s so meaningful,” Teitelbaum reflects. “It’s so crazy that it was able to stay there that long, and then the fact that it fell off is just like, that’s just how it goes.”

A subconscious aspect of her personality that continually surfaces on this album is her younger self—in particular who Teitelbaum was around ages 16 and 17. Sometimes it’s just a single line, like on “What’s Fair” (“And some things you’d like to skip / 16 sucking dick in the bathroom”), or it’s the reverie embedded in “Event of a Fire.” Teitelbaum wrote the latter song after there was a fire at the Holiday Inn she was staying at on tour. “We were outside of Boston, and it was snowing, and it was like, four in the morning, and you’re always tired on tour,” she recalls. “And I just woke up and was like, ‘I will not be taking the stairs.’” (Don’t worry—she says she won’t be taking an elevator during a fire again.) And while Teitelbaum’s describing this incident in the song, she sidetracks into memories about being a teenager—some Virginia Woolf-style stream-of-consciousness, in which a slight change in scent or sound can transport the narrator into the past (“Like I’m 16 / ‘Cause part of me never left her in 2012 / Part of me is still getting all of my haircuts for someone else” and later, “Like I’m 16 / Part of me really left her she was never found / Part of me still sits at home in a panic over 15 pounds”).

When I ask how 17-year-old Sabrina is different from present-day Sabrina, she answers simply, “Well, she was 17, so everything was like, ‘Am I going to be good enough to do this?’ And just like, a lot of doubt and excitement about stuff also. I think if you’re a 16, 17-year-old girl, inherently there’s just going to be a lot of doubt, because the world tells you to doubt yourself and that you’re not good enough, just by nature of existing.”

The darkest and most cathartic song on If You Asked For A Picture, “Man,” digs even deeper into what the world projects onto teenage girls and forces them to deal with. Teitelbaum describes the bridge as “one of the most important parts of the album.” Bolstered by driving, spacious guitar, she recounts a period of her life that will feel familiar to anyone who’s been told by an abuser that they’re in the wrong for defending themselves: “It started with a choke and you called me the kettle / For getting upset / And getting aggressive / But he was 28 and off of the handle / I was a kid wanting to cancel.” “I think, again, just by nature of existing at that age, you’re going to be sexualized in some way or another, even if you’re not ready for that,” she explains. “And I think that that was a lot of what this song was about. That kind of subject matter, obviously, is heavy, but it feels like a relief for me to talk about that stuff.” And hopefully she’s not the only person to find release in these songs, which capture the grit and grime of life with a wisdom, sense of humor, and softness that have all become synonymous with Blondshell.

Clare Martin is a writer and cemetery enthusiast. She works in a library in Dublin, which involves less shushing than you’d think.

COVER STORY | A Snapshot of Blondshell

In our latest Digital Cover Story, the Los Angeles-based indie rocker tells us about her grandmother’s house, the importance of the subconscious in her songwriting, and her sophomore album, If You Asked For A Picture.