Blondshell tries to make sense of her 20s on inquisitive single ’23’s A Baby’
Blondshell has shared a reflective new single titled ‘23’s A Baby’. Check it out below.
The new track comes from the singer’s forthcoming second album ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, which is set to arrive on May 2 via Partisan.
It follows on from lead single ‘T&A’, which the artist – real name Sabrina Teitelbaum – would later perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and the stripped-back love song ‘Two Times’.
In the latest single, Blondshell takes a look at the structure of life when you hit your 20s, referencing both the pressure to have things figured out, all the while still starting to understand who you are.
“You killed me with your bad habits/ You killed me when you had it/ The hopelessness is always see-through/ You know that I still need you,” she sings, leading up to the anthemic chorus: “‘Cause 23’s a baby/ Why’d you have a baby?”
“The song is partially about being in your 20s and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,” Teitelbaum said about the inspiration.
“I wanted it to have a bit of a nursery rhyme feel. It’s a heavy subject so it was important to have fun when we made it.” Check it out below, alongside a music video that was directed by Yazz Jansen.
‘If You Asked For A Picture’ marks the follow-up to Blondshell’s self-titled debut album, and gets its title from a line in the 1986 poem Dogfish by Mary Oliver. Visit here to pre-order.
Blondshell’s 2023 self-titled debut album was given a five-star review from NME, which noted: “‘Blondshell’ is a complete triumph in several ways. Rarely do emerging artists receive the benefit of the doubt to change tack, recalibrate their sound and allow their lived experiences to develop and find their way into the music.
“Too often is that creator pigeonholed or, worse, written off – and such could have been the case for Teitelbaum. Instead, we have one of the alternative rock albums of the year, and one to treasure tightly for quite some time.”
As well as the upcoming album, the artist has announced a series of UK and European tour dates. Visit here to buy tickets.
Back in the summer of 2023, NME spoke to Blondshell as part of The Cover, and the singer discussed how her self-titled debut album tackled a number of vulnerable topics in a bid to help her “feel better” about herself.
On ‘Sober Together’, for instance, she charts helping a friend through sobriety while they struggle with relapsing. “I was so mad at this person, and I went to write a ‘fuck you’ song to get that out,” she explained in the interview. “While I was writing, I was like, ‘Fuck you, but also, I love you, and I wouldn’t be mad if I didn’t love you’.
“It helped me get in touch with that part of my feelings for somebody else. I was really grateful for it – it’s much more comfortable to feel like ‘but I still love you’ than it is to feel like ‘you’re shitty for doing this’.”
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Liberty Dunworth
NME
