INTERVIEW: LA singer Blondshell aims for “detail and nuance” on her second album If You Asked For a Picture: “I was willing to try a lot more stuff”
Words: Emma Driver
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Daniel Topete
Published: 2 May 2025
Los Angeles is the hotspot hometown for some of America’s finest female artists in pop and indie music. Writers of intricate lyrics like Phoebe Bridgers, Gracie Abrams and the HAIM sisters are all LA natives, and the likes of Miley Cyrus and Chappell Roan have found inspiration and acceptance since making the city their home. It’s a musical geography where Blondshell – real name Sabrina Teitelbaum – fits right in. Teitelbaum was born in New York but shifted west to California when she graduated from high school a decade ago, and since then she has more than held her own among LA’s musical luminaries.
California inspires her, Teitelbaum has said, from its singer-songwriter heritage to its bombastic rock bands (think Queens of the Stone Age and Red Hot Chili Peppers). On her second album If You Asked For a Picture, she marries these two influences perfectly. Slabs of indie-rock guitar are laid under the lyrics of a sensitive songwriter, and the bedrock stays solid on every track. It’s cohesive but it’s also an electrifying experience, as the songs constantly teeter on the edge of breaking apart with angst or regret – like so many of the best rock songs do.
Teitelbaum’s 2023 debut for her Blondshell project, the self-titled Blondshell, was critically acclaimed from the moment of its release (the Los Angeles Times called it ‘the rock debut of 2023’); now, with her second album, The New York Times has hailed her as an ‘alt-rock supernova’. There is an exploding-star quality in Teitelbaum’s musical sky, and her songs build to big crescendos to match the scope of the feelings – betrayal, anger, sorrow, obsession. There’s excitement, but Teitelbaum also gives her lyrics space to breathe, as she holds notes for maximum impact and delivers devastating lines with a cool wryness – even as piled-on guitars fill up all the space around her. On ‘Arms’, she declares: “I don’t wanna be your mom / But you’re not strong enough / The world isn’t aching like you are,” mixing an everyday argument staple – I’m not your mother! – with a perspective that reaches out into the wider world.
Sung in a similarly understated way but reaching for higher truths is “I got a lot of free rein and cocaine / And pretty clothes and shifting goals / But I needed the world from you,” on ‘Man’, its simple melody sitting low in her vocal range and generating an irresistible hypnosis. Then there’s ‘Toy’, where Teitelbaum lets her voice sit more lightly in the song while turning over every facet of an idea in her hand: “He’s been getting sick, sick of me / What makes you sick isn’t the weather / It’s a change in degrees” – again lining up the small observations next to the wider ones. Then the kicker: “What’s the point of all the talking? Just say that you don’t think you have control.” You get the feeling that whoever she’s talking will never admit it, so she’s left guessing at their motives. The track has all the electric jangle of a Cure or Go-Betweens song, its singable guitar lines mixed with pop vocal touches, all carefully produced but still with an inner clutter of feeling.
‘What’s Fair’, ‘Event of a Fire’ and ‘Thumbtack’ start more simply and sweetly, but both come with a lyrical kick to the guts – there’s no getting lulled into prettiness, as much as Teitelbaum’s voice draws you in. A touch of slide guitar on ‘Model Rockets’ closes the album with a slower narrative feel – at least until the stadium-rock key change reminds us that we’re somewhere a little louder: “And I don’t know what I want anymore / Looking right by, asking the question / Life may have been happening elsewhere.” Again Teitelbaum pushes herself – and us – to look further outward in personal chaos, even when doing that reveals that we don’t really know what we want after all. Never claustrophobic, her writing instead scatters images of the outside, the external world, to mirror or extend what is going on inside.
To find out how Teitelbaum brought all these elements together on If You Asked For a Picture, Women In Pop’s Jett Tattersall caught up with her just a few days before the album launch.
Sabrina, hello, and we are loving the new album. I’ve been playing and playing it. How are you feeling now that it’s about to come out?
I’m so ready for it to come out. I’ve had it for a hot minute, so I’m just excited to put it out, and it’s hard to be in the waiting time where you have it, but people haven’t heard it yet. Singles are cool – I like putting out singles – but I think it’s really meant to be listened to as a whole album.
It definitely feels to like you’re playing through a mood – there’s a full journey with it. With your debut [Blondshell], it was all kind of sprawled out on the bedroom floor, whereas this one, it feel like you’ve stood up with your guitar and squared your shoulders – there’s a bit more stomp to it. Did it feel different to you too?
I think with the last one, I didn’t want to edit anything. I found a production thing that worked for me, and I was scared that if I edited or tried to change up the process, it wouldn’t work. And with this album, I was willing to try a lot more stuff, to edit and just focus more on details and nuance. And I think I was able to show different sides of myself for that reason.
You’re right, it feels a little bit more like you’ve got the windows open. You’ve said it’s a collection of songs about love, family, and friendships in all the right and wrong places. Did you intentionally have themes running through it, or did it just turn out that way?
I think it just turned out that way. I can’t ever change the core of the song as it comes out. The emotion that’s in the song and what the song is about is set in stone, and that just exists. And then I can change the details, and I can move the song structure around, but the way that it comes out – if it’s angry or sad, or any of those things – I don’t really pick that. It just shows up.
What I love about your music is that you saddle anger with a very humorous self-reflection. It’s like a retrospective: you’re thinking back on hard times, and you’re also like, “Yeah, but maybe I was being a dick …”
Completely! Because of course I was. I have to talk about my side of it too, and where I was an asshole. But I also think that even if you’re having the worst day of your life, there’s still going to be moments that are really funny. On the worst day of your life, maybe you’re not going to be experiencing joy or peace, but someone’s going to say something funny. Maybe it’s the family I come from, but there’s always humour in everything. Because at the end of the day, everything is always okay. The world keeps going. You keep existing. So there has to be humour, in some ways.
Is that just in you, in your life, or does it come out through the creation process? As you’re putting down these brutal lyrics, do you just pause and go, “Hold on a second …”?
I’m twenty-seven – twenty-eight in a couple weeks – and I think I’ve just seen a lot. So I think I’m practised in figuring out that the world keeps fucking turning, you know!
Your songs really lend themselves to the closing credits of an incredible film – and I’m not even talking about the delightful visuals that have been coming with this album. When you’re creating your music, is there always a visual world tracking?
No, not at all. I think that’s amazing when artists are able to have both of those things. But I’m so verbal and not visual that it’s actually been a challenge for me the last couple years to figure out what the album art should look like, or what a music video should look like, or stage design. All that is really not so familiar to me. I’m not a visual person. So it’s taken some time.
It sort of occurred to me that [the visual element] could be really casual – it doesn’t have to be that deep and that perfect. It’s just choices – do you like this sound or that sound? And then you pick one. It’s all just choices that accumulate. And I realised it’s kind of the same thing for the visuals. It’s all just instincts. If there are ten people who would be down to make a music video, what does my instinct say?
Well, your instincts are on the money. As you’ve said, you’re all about words: is there a song on the record that you found particularly hard to write, or that you second-guessed?
Parts of ‘Event of a Fire’, parts of ‘What’s Fair’, and parts of ‘23’s a Baby’. I think so much of it is mining my own life, and mining my dating life and the stuff that I’ve been through. When you start to incorporate other people, then I’m sort of second-guessing sometimes, but there wasn’t a tonne of second-guessing lyrics.
‘23’s a Baby’ has those great lines: “But you deserve some hell from me / While I figure out if you’re the enemy” …
I think the doubt with that song was that maybe it didn’t have to be a single. It was so personal. I thought, if it’s not a single, then maybe people won’t hear it – they won’t pay attention to it and it’ll just fade into the background. And then I was like, “That can’t be the goal!”
“So, maybe if I don’t release it, no one will hear it. It’ll be fine …”
Yeah, exactly!
On that note, is there a lyric on this album that actually sums up where you are at right now?
There’s a song called ‘Change’, and there’s part of it that’s like, “When I finally have him, I’ll know I never liked his face.” I’m not in that kind of a situation right now. I just feel like that sums up a lot of the album. It’s the illusion of this thing that will make your life perfect if you get it, but then you get it, and you’re like, “Not only did it not change my life, but I actually don’t like it.” It’s just a big metaphor for relationships. And I think that sums up the album, in a way.
Thank you so much for your time, Sabrina, and congratulations again on the album.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it!
If You Asked for a Picture is out now via Partisan/Mushroom Music. You can download and stream here.
Follow Blondshell on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and her website
