Blondshell Album Reviews

Sabrina Teitelbaum flirted with musical success in a different guise. Between 2017 and 2019, she released singles as the pop artist BAUM. Her grandfather, Randall D Smith, is known as the pioneer of vulture capitalism.

Dissatisfied with the results, she showed her producer an alt-rock song she’d been working on. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she got sober and wrote a full album of songs influenced by 1990s artists like Hole, PJ Harvey, and Mitski.

Blondshell Album Reviews

Blondshell

2023, 8/10
While quarantined in her East Los Angeles apartment, Teitelbaum wrote much of her debut album.

The record starts with its strongest track, ‘Veronica Mars’ – there’s a great guitar freakout halfway through the track. Producer Yves Rothman, who’s also worked with Yves Tumor, cowrote ‘Sepsis’ – Teitelbaum’s charismatic enough to carry the half-spoken bridge:

He wears a front-facing cap
The sex is almost always bad
I don’t care ’cause I’m in love
I don’t know him well enoughBlondshell, Sepsis

It occasionally feels lightweight, but strong tunes like ‘Joiner’ and ‘Kiss City’ maintain momentum.

Blondshell isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but her angsty 1990s alt-rock is effective.

If You Asked For A Picture

2025, 8.5/10
Teitelbaum’s second album mines the same territory as her first. But it’s even better – more refined and more confident. Like most good alternative music, angst fuels If You Asked For A Picture. While it’s often directed at disappointing men, ‘What’s Fair’ examines her volatile relationships with her mum.

I think sonically, I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, because this is the kind of music I’ve always liked the most. During the pandemic, I started being like, ‘Well nobody’s going to hear this anyway, so I can just write whatever I want’ – and that was when I got all of the songs that I’ve got now.

Sabrina Teitelbaum, NME

It sounds like a well-worn formula, but Teitelbaum’s tuneful sincerity is extremely effective. ‘Thumbtack’ is a great opener, yearning and folk-flavoured, a false gambit before ‘T&A’ explodes out of the speakers. As you might expect, ‘T&A’ is partially inspired by The Rolling Stones’ typically sexist ‘Little T&A’.

If You Asked For A Picture sounds mundane on paper, but works well in practice.

Best Blondshell Songs

• What’s Fair
• Veronica Mars
• T&A
• Sepsis
• Thumbtack.

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