Blondshell makes rock music. Get over it.

It’s not that Sabrina Teitelbaum ever intentionally set out to put a razor-sharp scalpel to the pitfalls and perversions of modern dating on her debut self-titled outing as Blondshell. But, as she reflects, sipping on a mint tea a couple of days into her London trip (she’s particularly been loving the Sunday roast culture that is lacking from her home town of Los Angeles), back then in the trenches, there was little she could do to stop it. “With the last album, I was just in so deep with that relationship,” she says. “I was always writing about that guy because that’s what I was spending all my time doing.” 

As a result, however, 2023’s ‘Blondshell’ immediately positioned Teitelbaum as one of the decade’s most exciting new alt-rock voices. A scuzzy, riffy, coming-of-rage record that showed her pen was just as sharp as her six-stringed sword, her debut rang with hard-earned anger and gut-punch lyrical pay-offs; glowing reviews and a spot on Obama’s end of year list followed.

When it came to approaching its successor, however, Teitelbaum – now moved on from her ex – looked at her world and saw something very different reflected back. “This time it was more about: what choices do I want to make now I have the freedom to make choices? What kind of person do I want to be with? How do I want to spend my time? There are all these options for what my life can look like and how I can exist.”

‘If You Asked For A Picture’ takes this snapshot of Teitelbaum, now aged 27, and widens the lens. ‘What’s Fair’ is a frequently devastating look at the parental relationship she readily describes as “a blatant, in-your-face, fucked-up situation”. “What’s a fair assessment of the job that you did / Do you ever even regret it?” goes its chorus. ‘Toy’, meanwhile, lands like a self-lacerating conveyor belt of troubles, with nods to antidepressants, low libido and body image struggles.

There is – very evidently – a lot of trauma and unpacking going on throughout Blondshell’s second record. But Teitelbaum is also vehemently opposed to the idea of having to seek out drama, or live in perpetual angst, for the sake of her art. “People have told me my entire life – and I don’t think people say this to men – that you have to basically be miserable to write,” she says. “Even when you learn that something’s not true, in your core you still feel it. So that was harder for me [to overcome] than the actual finding of subject matter.” 

Sober now for five years and in the second half of her twenties, her priorities are “solid”. “It’s so laughable the idea that being 27 is ‘older’, but I feel more grown up,” she says. “When I turned 27 I was like, ‘Oh shit, this feels different. I don’t feel like a kid.’” But, as with many things she’s had to learn to deal with as a woman playing guitar in an increasing spotlight, you can be the most strong, confident, objectively successful version of yourself, and the outside world will still want to offer its two pence.

For Teitelbaum, it’s meant taking a vastly different approach to the way she goes about her songwriting and the way she goes about its public-facing accoutrements. Lyrically, she says, nothing is off the table. “There are things I want to save for myself, that I just don’t feel are other people’s business, but I don’t have that filter with the music,” she notes. “I wouldn’t be able to write at all if I thought about people listening to it.” When it comes to engaging with the online world, however, her face drops almost instantly.

“I get a feeling when I’ve been on social media too long that’s like a spiritual nausea where I’m just like, feeling sick inside…” she laughs. “My soul feels bad. It feels stale inside. Everybody has something to say, and the form of misogyny I’ve felt my whole life is a different form now that I am a musician in a professional sense. It’s a different brand of misogyny and I am not really willing to subject myself to that.

“For me, it’s like: ‘Why are you wearing a suit? You’re trying to be a man’,” she narrates. “Women and queer people in different genres face different flavours of homophobia and misogyny. Pop is more of a classic form, like body criticisms and criticisms of your life and relationships, and in rock and alternative music there’s a lot of, ‘Why are you trying to be a man? This is our space and our air that you’re trying to breathe’. You’re trying to sit in our seat at our table and you’re not allowed to. So not being in the comment sections will be very important for my health and my soul.”

Women and queer people in different genres face different flavours of homophobia and misogyny. Pop is more about body criticisms and in rock there’s a lot of: ‘Why are you trying to be a man?’

Blondshell

With ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, chances are the internet’s worst Y-chromosomes will probably be coming for Teitelbaum even harder. An album that purposefully seeks a greater sense of light and shade within its dynamics, on the likes of acoustic guitar-centred opener ‘Thumbtack’, the softness of a lifetime spent listening to singer-songwriters is given space to come through. On the flip side, however, ahead of the album’s release Blondshell has been waxing lyrical about her love of California’s big rock bands – Queens of the Stone Age and Red Hot Chili Peppers chief among them. You can almost hear the trolls revving their engines from the mere mention.

For Teitelbaum, however, it’s just what comes out. Having returned to LA after a couple of years of heavy touring, she was drawn to the bands that sounded like a piece of California. Having spent a period of time assessing her current place in life, she found herself naturally digging back to the cornerstones that first steered it in that direction. “In some ways, every person that’s writing songs is writing about their family because your first meaningful relationship with anybody in the world is with your parents,” she suggests, “so it’s undeniable that everybody is writing about their parents through the lens of other people. Me writing about dating on my last record isn’t so different from writing about family in a more explicit way on this record.”

Also nestled within the knotty themes that crop up on Blondshell’s second are nods to her lifelong struggles with OCD. It’s something that comes and goes, but that Teitelbaum has pinpointed as a larger problem with maintaining control: a tricky situation to be in when you’re about to bare your soul on record with the world watching. “There’s nothing I left behind that I didn’t put into this album in terms of what I had to say; the work I did on it; the commitment. I put 100% into the album – everything I had. So then you put it out and people might like it a little bit, or hate it, or not care that much. If you’re a musician, that’s kind of the ultimate relinquishing of control,” she nods slowly. “It’s been harder this time. Last time, I was like, ‘Nobody’s gonna hear it’. And now it’s like, well some people are gonna hear it and they might not like it…”

Some people – the ones, inevitably, who don’t want someone like Teitelbaum coming in and demanding rightful space at the top table – might not. For the rest of us, however, Blondshell has made a second album that cements her seat among a new generation of modern rock greats.

But hey, you can’t please them all.