How Blondshell Became an Alt-Rock Supernova
With songs about addiction and sobriety, praise kink, friend breakups, familial strife, body dysmorphia and, as she put it, 'choosing to be in relationships with bad dudes,' Sabrina Teitelbaum has quickly earned a reputation for putting it all out there. But for a while, the singer and songwriter who records as Blondshell kept her career ambitions under wraps.
A born-and-raised New Yorker, Teitelbaum, 28, spent her high school years stomping around downtown Manhattan, singing original songs at open mic nights under a slew of aliases. Her musical life was 'kind of private,' she said, waxing nostalgic during a walk along the High Line on a brisk but sunny March afternoon. 'I didn't really talk to people in my family about it. I didn't talk to my friends about it.'
In town from her current home in Los Angeles, and braced for the elements in a zipped black anorak and Saint Laurent shades, Teitelbaum flew under the radar amid throngs of tourists in Chelsea. Her era of performing anonymously, however, at venues like Pianos and the erstwhile incubator Sidewalk Cafe, is over.
In 2022, her first single as Blondshell generated buzz that hearkened back to an earlier, blog-fueled era of indie-rock, and her subsequent self-titled debut earned fans and spots on many critics' 2023 year-end lists for its grungy rock and frank, self-implicating lyricism. Now, on the cusp of releasing her second album, 'If You Asked for a Picture,' on Friday, Teitelbaum is working out just how much more of herself to reveal to her growing audience.
'All the things I was saying in the songs were things that I didn't feel comfortable saying to people in conversation,' she said. 'And I think that's kind of still the case.'
Teitelbaum's music leans heavily on '90s alternative aesthetics and her lyrics can be impressionistic or straightforwardly narrative, but they're consistently ruptured by off-kilter imagery or flashes of deadpan humor. This is part of the singer's balancing act: She counters the weight of her material with wryness; the bluster of vintage rock (she loves a guitar solo) with unguarded intimacy.
Teitelbaum grew up in Midtown at the tail end of the early 2000s rock boom and was granted a long leash to explore. She fondly recalled listening to bands like Vampire Weekend and the National and getting her fake ID confiscated at the Hell's Kitchen venue Terminal 5. Her father, to whom she credits her education in classic rock, is the former chief executive of the e-cigarette giant NJOY. Her mother, who Teitelbaum has said was absent during her childhood, was the daughter of the hedge fund mogul Randall Smith. (She died in 2018, and Teitelbaum deflected questions about their relationship.)
Mothers and daughters are a recurring motif on 'If You Asked for a Picture,' though. They're at the center of 'What's Fair,' a sweet-and-salty assessment of familiar maternal faults ('You'd want me to be famous so you could live by proxy / You always had a reason to comment on my body'); and '23's a Baby,' a cheeky reckoning with the knowledge that parenthood does not confer maturity. The album's emotional centerpiece is 'Event of a Fire,' an imagistic slow burner packed with childhood vignettes and oblique references to generational trauma.
While she avoids specifics, Teitelbaum says this subject matter isn't so distant from the themes of her first record, which dealt more with fraught romantic relationships. 'Even if you're not explicitly talking about being a kid and being in dysfunction, I think it's inherently there,' she said — nodding to attachment theory, and how bonds with our parents become templates for relationships throughout our lives.
For Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney, '23's a Baby' exemplifies the strength of Teitelbaum's songcraft in both its gravity and its stickiness. 'It's not very common for songwriters to be willing to go that personal or that raw,' she said in an interview. 'That's a really strong craft, to be able to write about motherhood and parenting, and the consequences of it, and the relationship that you have that lasts a lifetime. And she also made it a really catchy song.'
Teitelbaum's formal education in songwriting came from the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, which she attended for two years before dropping out because of her aversion to the school's core curriculum requirements ('I was taking oceanography,' she noted dryly). While enrolled, she adopted the artist name Baum and recorded booming, brooding electro-pop in the vein of Halsey or Bishop Briggs. Colored with sass and a pop feminist perspective ('Don't call me Barbie / Does it look like I own a thing in pink,' went one song, with an added expletive), the tracks garnered modest attention online before Teitelbaum retired the project around 2019.
In hindsight, that body of work reflected Teitelbaum's strong songwriting point of view, but a weaker sonic one. 'Production-wise, I was just working with people I was hanging out with,' she recalled, 'and felt more willing to chase what I thought other people thought was cool.' Around that time, she was also doing rounds of what she termed 'music speed dating,' meeting with a revolving door of collaborators for one-off writing sessions. For a while, nothing was clicking.
But it was on one fateful 'date' that she met Yves Rothman, who has gone on to produce both of her records. Rothman got his start making bruising music with the Midwest punk band Living Things, and is a collaborator of the experimental artist Yves Tumor. He's also worked closely with a handful of singer-songwriters in addition to Teitelbaum — including Aly & AJ and Stella Rose — who straddle rock and pop.
Rothman shepherded Teitelbaum's rebrand, helping to realign her sound in a way that more authentically reflected her taste — retaining the dark tint of her Baum output, but grounding it in grungy live instruments instead of synths. Applied to 'Olympus,' a bleak song about destructive love that ultimately became Blondshell's debut single, that treatment gave Teitelbaum's caustic writing an edge it had previously lacked. She sings the final version like she's dragging around a ball and chain. When she first played Rothman the song, 'That's when he said, 'We need to make an album,'' she recalled.
Since she became Blondshell, Teitelbaum has frequently been likened to female rock luminaries of an earlier generation — particularly Courtney Love, Dolores O'Riordan and Liz Phair, who took her on tour. While apt, such comparisons feel overly eager to situate the young singer in a sort of feminist matriarchal lineage.
The press materials for 'If You Asked for a Picture' cite a different set of sonic references (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queens of the Stone Age) that suggest a desire to complicate gendered readings of her music. 'T&A,' the album's sardonic and wrenching lead single, which Teitelbaum performed on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' in a suit, was loosely inspired by 'Little T&A' by the Rolling Stones — the archetypal dude band. (Though perhaps this is itself a subtle nod to Phair, whose own 'Exile in Guyville' responded to the Stones' 'Exile on Main St.')
'I think, in some ways, talking about female musicians through the lens of feminism has been a way to minimize the complexity of them as musicians,' said Teitelbaum, choosing her words carefully, and then hedging: 'It can be.'
She's similarly ambivalent about calling her — admittedly confessional — songwriting 'vulnerable,' a word that minimizes her agency in the process. Laser-focused and assertive in conversation, she rebutted a characterization of her songs as 'insecure,' in reference to their themes of body dysmorphia: 'For me, it's a form of security or confidence to be able to talk about things that feel shameful,' she said. Her posture was understandably defensive: Public-facing Sabrina was protecting songwriter Sabrina, so she could save all her sensitivity for her craft. She has yet to hold back a song for fear of overexposure, she said.
The singer-songwriter Samia, who got to know Teitelbaum when she was still going by Baum, also pointed to the confidence behind her friend's confessions. 'I think it's brave to speak so plainly and trust that people will understand the context,' she said in an interview, adding that Teitelbaum had 'encouraged me to make some riskier decisions.'
Teitelbaum has built and rebuilt her confidence over time. She recalled her first night opening for Phair in 2023, after a string of her own headlining shows: 'We soundchecked, and the pace was so much faster than I was used to,' she said. 'I remember talking to my band after, and being like, 'I was so comfortable before, and now I feel like the new person in the room.''
The experience was motivating, not discouraging: 'I was like, 'I'm going to get better.''
With another big tour on the horizon, Teitelbaum is eager to continue growing as a performer — but not to give too much of herself away. 'I don't have to have some story going from this section of the show to that section. I don't have to come up with banter,' she said. Not everything 'has to be 'tee-hee,'' she's realized.
A number of years ago, Teitelbaum set a goal for herself to book the Fonda, a famed theater on Hollywood Boulevard. In her next run of shows, she'll check it off her bucket list. But her favorite place to tour is on the East Coast, and hometown crowds are particularly special. Being back in New York is 'emotionally charged,' she said, as opposed to Los Angeles, which can feel 'monotonous.' She's contemplating a move back home. (Another reason: A true New Yorker, she never learned to drive.)
In the meantime, Teitelbaum's visit stirred something. She brought up Sharon Van Etten's music video for her song 'Seventeen,' in which the singer visits personal landmarks around New York, shadowed by a teenage look-alike. The video captures the potent intersections of place and memory — the junctures where past and present selves collide.
Teitelbaum wondered aloud if she was being corny. She wasn't; this was the stuff of great songs yet to be written.
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