Consider If You Asked for a Picture as the second chapter in an ongoing novel chronicling the trials and tribulations of life in your 20s. On Sabrina Teitelbaum’s second album as Blondshell, which arrives two years after her eponymous debut, Teitelbaum is still haunted by the past and stumbling into the kinds of bad decisions that fueled Blondshell. Her head may be clouded by contradictions, yet here, she conveys these conflicted feelings in an increasingly confident, self-assured musical language.
That sense of impending clarity derives from an expanded soundscape of swirling, shape-shifting textures created by Teitelbaum and Yves Rothman, who reprises his role as producer from Blondshell. Opening track “Thumbtack” feels like the album in microcosm. What starts simple gets complicated quickly, as finger-picked acoustic guitars feint at folk before the song gets softer and richer, echoing the mellow breeze of yacht rock while retaining a nervy emotional center.
Teitelbaum remains rooted in the sound and sensibility of 1990s alt-rock, marrying the skeletal strums of lo-fi with billows of dream-pop harmonies and squalls of oversaturated guitars. Where her peers can occasionally seem mired in the moors of revivalism, Blondshell deploys these sounds in a painterly fashion, letting the fading echoes of her voice intertwine with decaying guitar distortion and occasionally puncturing her sighing melodies with shards of noise.
Throughout If You Asked for a Picture, Teitelbaum’s affectless voice cuts through the enveloping fog of introspection. After spending a song perched between a murmur and a sigh, she’ll unexpectedly deliver a lyrical barb, its bluntness emphasized by her lack of a vibrato. Again and again, she’s sorting out the mess of romance, resigning herself to staying in a partnership for practical concerns (“I’ll stick with you, ’cause I like sleeping well, she sings on “He Wants Me”). On “Man,” wondering if “a lot of wiggle room” and drugs are reason enough to be in a relationship, she describes herself as “a kid wanting to cancel.” But for most of If You Asked for a Picture, she’s plagued by the immaturity of others. Often, she pictures herself in a maternal role, bearing the responsibility of parenting immature boyfriends. She flatters the subject of “Two Times” by singing “You’d be a good dad/You carried me to the bed,” a description that hits harder after hearing how the accidental lover of “T&A” “turned right from a man into a boy.”
Some of the album’s parental imagery comes from a heavier place; Teitelbaum’s mother died in 2018, and several songs appear to address their relationship. Over a crawling tempo that gains in intensity as guitar overdubs pile up, Teitelbaum flashes through adolescent memories on “Event of a Fire,” realizing if “part of me never left her in 2012/Part of me is still getting all of my haircuts for someone else.” The memories turn prickly on “What’s Fair,” when she deliberately sours her empathy with pointed accusations, all delivered as a piece of urgent fuzz-pop. All this rumination builds to “23’s A Baby,” where she asks a direct, spiky question: “23’s a baby,” goes the chorus, “Why’d you have a baby?”
The painful truths of “23’s A Baby” never feel anguished thanks to a persistent pop pulse. It’s a trick Teitelbaum and Rothman pull off repeatedly throughout If You Asked for a Picture: The songs may arise from turmoil, but the production is enveloping and inviting, suggesting there’s a path out of the darkness. The album’s last track, “Model Rockets,” with its dreamy girl-group sway, cements this impression, pivoting on the line “The problem is I don’t know what I want anymore.” The lyrics are born of confusion while the music is vivid and assured—a paradox that exemplifies Teitelbaum’s emergence from her 20s bearing evident scars along with a stronger sense of self.
