The world according to Sabrina Teitelbaum can be brutal. It is populated by dirtbag men, wayward friends, and the constant lure of mind-numbing substances. “Ur just doing ur best and life is like ‘hehe I’m gonna present u with the biggest challenges ever,’” the 25-year-old songwriter, who records as Blondshell, says. Across the nine songs on her self-titled debut, she sifts through the muck of early adulthood, searching for intimacy in a dreary loop of partying and bad sex, but her revivalist alt-rock and stadium hooks offer a bracing release from the hangover.
Blondshell is a tale of two cities. Teitelbaum was raised in Midtown, Manhattan and graduated from the prestigious Dalton School, which boasts distinguished alumni like Anderson Cooper and Wallace Shawn. She then relocated to Los Angeles to study at USC’s Thornton School of Music, dropping out after two years to focus on her solo pop project BAUM and releasing “Fuckboy,” a Chainsmokers-lite track that went viral. But working as Blondshell, she succumbs to her childhood love of ’90s alternative rock acts like Hole, Liz Phair, and the Cranberries, leveraging lean drums and loud, jagged guitar to capture faded days in flashback: the stink of vodka, a heap of crushed cans, frequent blackouts, drugs seeping out of the pores.
Teitelbaum, who is now sober, traces her coast-to-coast voyage with a shaky red line, examining the teenage antics that mutated into addiction over the years. On the spacious, heat-warped “Sober Together,” she confronts a friend who’s sliding off the wagon. “Not in a position to judge,” she sings in a glassy falsetto, “I know with drugs/There’s never enough.” She is skeptical of the friend’s urge to resolve things by fleeing to New York, knowing that her own cross-country move failed to erase any problems.
People are included on her list of potential toxins. On “Tarmac” and glimmering closer “Dangerous,” she admits to fearing her own friends, a troubled but magnetic bunch that recalls the venomous cliques of Mean Girls and Heathers. And then of course there’s love, a chemical dependency Teitelbaum explores on the shadowy grunge ballad “Olympus.” “I’d still kill for you/I’d die to spend the night at your belonging,” she drawls over scratchy acoustic and skeletal drums. It’s a pitiable confession that most of us can relate to—contorting every cell of your being to make a lover stick around. Sometimes the dude is not worth the risk. On the clever “Sepsis,” she growls about a pathetic boyfriend—“He wears a front-facing cap/The sex is almost always bad”—before a swell of distorted guitar slams back in with the damning chorus: “It should take a whole lot less/To turn me off.” Teitelbaum doesn’t offer many specifics on Blondshell, but her lyrics are stronger and more relatable when she scrawls down a few dirty details like this.
For all of her self-flagellation, Teitelbaum is far more potent when she’s pissed off. On the revenge scorcher “Salad,” she plans the murder of a friend’s assailant. “She took him to the courthouse/And somehow he got off,” she grumbles over muted power chords. “Then I saw him laughing with his lawyer in the parking lot.” In the chorus, Teitelbaum’s band kicks into full-blown arena rock, dissonant, high-pitched piano keys clanging amid brassy guitars. Her voice pitches up into a pained cry as she lands a chilling line: “It doesn’t happen to women I know.”
Teitelbaum doesn’t write happy endings, but Blondshell’s best song is its most hopeful. The blistering “Kiss City” finds the artist belting about the desire for healthy, unapologetic love. “Palm in palm/It turns me on/When you tell me you’re not going away,” she sings, her voice fraying a little at the edges. For Teitelbaum, security is foreplay—the calm that precedes the crescendo. But she stands just outside of the romance, “adjacent to a lot of love,” as she puts it. In its closing minute, “Kiss City” cracks open; Teitelbaum switches to a megaphone holler, as a searing guitar solo cuts through like a symphony of bottle rockets. Tangled in the noise, she is vulnerable, imperfect, and rapturous.
