Blondshell is done giving us every part of her: “Things get lost if you say too much”

“Y“ou don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway, I don’t want to tell it.” So goes one line of Mary Oliver’s 1983 poem ‘Dogfish’, tucked between poignant observations on the natural world. While many analyses of the piece skip over that sentence, it jumped out at Blondshell’s Sabrina Teitelbaum when she read it. Having poured the deepest, most intimate parts of herself into her 2023 self-titled debut album (to critical acclaim), it chimed with something she’d been ruminating on in the wake of that release – how much she needed to keep giving of herself and her story to those now listening to her.

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“I think the whole basis of telling people about yourself when you meet them, whether it’s through music or a conversation, is to connect with them,” she tells NME, leaning forward across the table in the lobby of her east London hotel. “Sometimes, when you’re trying so hard to make a connection with somebody, you tell them everything about yourself. Things get lost if you say too much.”

Her second album, ‘If You Ask For A Picture’, which also takes its name from ‘Dogfish’, doesn’t give all of Teitelbaum, but it doesn’t hold back either. Rather, it seeks to delve into the often-unexplored “grey areas” that exist between the drama – the constant hum of pain that persists behind even the most mundane moments of life.

When NME meet Teitelbaum a month prior to its release, she’s relaxed, energised from the lottery win of landing in London from Los Angeles during its rare few faux-spring days – a brief splintering of sunshine before the freezing rain resumes for a little while longer. She’ll head to Paris in two days and, almost in preparation, she’s been thumbing through a copy of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed while lounging around the capital’s parks. “I like to read books that are in the setting I’m in,” she says. “And I’m always reading books by women and listening to classic storytellers who are women, because I think that there’s a complexity there.”

“Not every moment of my life is spent being angry”

That same complexity, though, is frequently subject to misunderstanding – an experience Teitelbaum is all too familiar with. When her first album came out, swathes of the press heralded it as a masterclass in “female rage”. This, in part, came from the thread of anger that ran through it – ‘Salad’, for example, saw her daydream about murdering a man who assaulted her best friend. Yet Teitelbaum admits feeling “mixed” about those suggesting the entire LP was drenched in wrath. “It was a really angry record, and I am a woman, so it isn’t wrong. But sometimes it’s like, ‘OK, you’re flattening my existence into just being about this one piece’.

“I think I feel pretty masculine as a person, and my relationship with gender has been somewhat complicated. On the first album, I wanted to show people who I was for the first time, and so it was important for me to really hit you over the head with it so that you understood who I am and how I feel inside,” she explains. “With this album, I realised that the idea I had that softness would cancel out my masculinity isn’t true. Not every moment of my life is spent being angry.”

This time, the masculine energy crops up in the sonic influences instead, something she deems as “heavier, dirtier guitar tones” from the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Strokes – the latter of whom she admires for their consistency. “I like the fact they didn’t ever really change it up,” she explains. It’s a contrast to the pressure to constantly reinvent or ‘rebrand’, imposed upon female artists today. “I think that men have been allowed to have certain aesthetic things that haven’t really been available to solo female artists. I leaned on those aesthetics for confidence in a way, in a studio space.”

It manifests in the album’s sludgier moments: the jagged, alt-rock guitar riffs and forceful, grungy basslines that introduce elements of more traditional rock than the indie undertones of her debut. Yet, it’s underpinned by a striking vulnerability – “little moments of fresh air”, as she puts it.

‘What’s Fair’, for example, is a harrowingly accurate portrait of the push-and-pull of a mother-daughter relationship, while ‘Two Times’ offers slightly insecure musings on a real-life love, one devoid of the drama of the rom-coms Teitelbaum was raised on. “How bad does it have to hurt to count? Does it have to hurt at all?” she drawls over a pensive acoustic guitar, alternating between the compulsion of a pure, safe love and the trepidation of surrendering to somebody else entirely.

It recalls a canon of love songs that herald simple domesticity as their muse – the sweet sheen of Graham Nash’s Joni Mitchell-dedicated ‘Our House’, and Paul McCartney’s swooning ‘My Love’, which fixates on still being able to find sustenance from bare kitchen cupboards over grander gestures of romance. Teitelbaum’s take, though, instils a little more horror, with contentment occasionally splintered by an anxious inner monologue of: “Is this all there is?”, before once again succumbing to sweetness.

Another recurring theme comes in her exploration of body image. On closer ‘Model Rockets’, she laments, “I got big and pigeonholed”, a reflection on being treated differently depending on her weight. ‘Event of a Fire’, meanwhile, sees her admit: “Part of me still sits at home in a panic over 15 pounds.”

“[On the album] there’s a lot of unspoken stuff that I lived with when I was younger, that I couldn’t say,” the 27-year-old explains, reflecting on growing up in the ’00s, where gossip magazines slapped grainy photos of celebrity cellulite on front pages and shamed anyone who couldn’t fit into a size zero. “That had a huge impact on me, the women in my family, my friends… everybody. I don’t know anybody who escaped that. But at the same time, even though everybody is thinking about it, you suffer it silently.”

When the pink-hued tsunami of fourth-wave feminism crashed into pop culture in the 2010s, a body positivity movement emerged in tow, just in time for Teitelbaum’s teenage years. Suddenly, there was an emphasis on self-love, and it was quickly adopted by fashion and beauty brands that had spent the prior decade shilling self-hatred alongside the same products they now marketed with inclusivity.

“I hope people feel relieved when they listen to this”

For Teitelbaum, the sudden whiplash-inducing shift had a profound impact. “There was suddenly this pressure to accept yourself, but nobody was telling you how to do that,” she says. “All that stuff comes out in the music because it’s a safe place to talk about it.”

This safe space, she says, has also proven to be a key point of refuge while living in Trump’s America – an experience she describes as a “hellscape”, shrouded in a worsened sense of “dystopian darkness”.

It’s why, though the album can’t be separated from the particularly chaotic era of history it emerges from, Teitelbaum is more interested in exploring the nuance of the inbetweens than the constant, looming catastrophe that punctuates our newsfeeds. “It’s hard to process what’s going on, because it’s so horrible. I was so depressed after the election, and in 2016 too, but at some point, you just have to continue to live your life, because that’s how it is. Everybody has to keep doing their job and living life.”

Part of that, she tells NME, has been an urgent need to find joy. “It feels like the best way to resist,” she says, before adding with an ironic smile: “But that is the world’s tiniest silver lining.”

This brightness doesn’t penetrate the gloom of ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, as Teitelbaum explains: “I have to feel so motivated to write, and the only times that I feel that are when I’m going through something.” Yet this paves the way for the undeniable string of catharsis that runs through it. “I think my whole life, I have looked for relief in different ways,” she says. “I hope people feel relieved when they listen to this.”

Blondshell’s ‘If You Ask For A Picture’ is out on May 2 via Partisan Records

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