Sabrina Teitelbaum was hailed as something of an alt-rock revivalist when she released her first album as Blondshell in 2023, after pivoting during the pandemic from a poppier project under the name BAUM. She proves her bona fides on the follow-up, If You Asked For a Picture. But Blondshell’s second album does more than just pick up where the first one left off: The hooks are sharper and the music is livelier and more dynamic. Teitelbaum sometimes sounded tentative on Blondshell, on songs that were muted as if she felt bound by the conventions of the early-’90s alt-rock that informs her sound. She takes a gutsier approach here, making those alt-rock tropes work for her instead of the other way around.
If You Asked For a Picture is a marvel of unflinching candor as Teitelbaum dissects dysfunctional relationships and misguided choices—her own, as often as not. At their best, the dozen songs here are both muscular and stick-in-your-head catchy. She employs bold swings between loud and quiet, and even the softer songs are coiled and taut. Teitelbaum comes off as fully present, which wasn’t always the case on Blondshell, where she occasionally sounded detached. Maybe the difference is the result of all the time she has had for self-examination while on the road over the past few years touring behind her debut.
Whatever the reason, Blondshell’s second album shows that her confidence has grown by a fair margin—enough so that she can interrogate her feelings with bracing honesty on “T&A” (a title she adapted from the Rolling Stones’ “Little T&A”) as she parses a male friend’s interest in making their relationship sexual. His attraction is mostly physical, and she wonders whether she should be put off or flattered. Big, overdriven guitars open the song and fade into a verse that she sings in conversational tones, before letting her voice ring out on a churning chorus. Teitelbaum takes a similar approach on “What’s Fair,” singing with tuneful restraint on the verses as she addresses a delinquent mother before posing a lacerating question on the blustery chorus: “What’s a fair assessment of the job you did?” she sings over chugging guitar, after recounting how she grew up too fast in her mom’s absence. The quiet-loud-quiet song structure emphasizes the roiling emotions that can accompany messy parent-child relationships, but that sounds almost too clinical: the song is visceral, and Teitelbaum balances anger with disappointment and a desire to understand her mother’s perspective.
That’s a nuanced take on a tricky subject, and while not every song on If You Asked For a Picture is so fraught, Teitelbaum doesn’t shy away from difficult themes. On “Event of a Fire,” it’s an existential weariness that she underscores with a musical arrangement that builds throughout the song from quiet electric guitar to a track fully fleshed out with growling guitars, a punchy bassline, and snapping drums. A track later, on “23’s a Baby,” Teitelbaum is wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of being a young adult who feels like she doesn’t know enough to be an adult, though people in earlier generations were often already parents at her age. The song all but skips along, adorned with sparkly wordless vocals and a bubbling beat.
Though Teitelbaum shows impressive growth on her second album, a handful of songs don’t spark as brightly as the rest. “Change” features lovely backing harmony vocals, but there’s not a lot of musical movement, while the layers of guitar in the musical arrangement on “Toy” feel like they are competing with her voice. Really, though, those amount to remnants of the learning curve she faced on her first album.
It’s understandable that her stylistic shift would require a bit of a transition. That’s essentially what Blondshell was. It’s impressive how fast Teitelbaum has grasped the possibilities of her new musical persona, which allows her to pair her impressive vocal chops with brawnier song structures that suit the emotional content of her lyrics. For the most part, If You Asked For a Picture is the work of a musician who has found her voice as a singer, and also as a writer who demonstrates a knack for honesty and a touch of wit.
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
