“You can’t quarantine the past,” Pavement wisely sang on ‘Gold Soundz’, a lyric that may as well be a mission statement for Blondshell’s second album, ‘If You Asked For A Picture’. The influence of experiences from years gone by is inescapable; Sabrina Teitelbaum’s present ponderings are shaped by distant memories, lingering regrets and the still-palpable sting of the criticisms that begin living in your head rent-free the moment you hear them.
On her searing self-titled debut album in 2023, the Los Angeles alt-rock artist (and second-ever artist to grace The Cover on NME) excavated the more recent past, raking over the ashes of a former relationship and sharing haunting stories of addiction and assault. Two years later, though, Teitelbaum looks further back. “There’s a lot of unspoken stuff that I lived with when I was younger, that I couldn’t say,” she told NME recently. ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ grapples with the kind of trauma that you absorb gradually and subtly as you grow up – a slow but steady trickle of toxicity that seeps into you without you realising until it’s too late.
‘Event Of A Fire’, a slow build from melancholy guitar arpeggios to bruising riffs, picks over the anguish that’s passed down through generations, acknowledging its impact on the life we assume we have free will over (“Part of me is still getting all my haircuts for someone else”). Think you’re only going to have to deal with your own baggage, not that of your parents or theirs before them? Think again – no wonder Teitelbaum’s exhausted. “The sign said, ‘Don’t forget to always take the stairs in the event of a fire’ / What if I’m burnt out?” she sighs, the despair in her voice growing.
This is the kind of record that could only be written after a certain point in life, its songs requiring a level of maturity that only comes with time. It puts parental relationships under the spotlight, illuminating the flaws and fuck-ups of those raising us, but refuses to leave the nuances and natural tension of that bond in the shadows. “I said something when I was 10 that I take back / But you deserve some hell from me,” Teitelbaum warns on ‘23’s A Baby’, sharing the blame instead of shrugging it off. On ‘What’s Fair’, she nods to a pattern in mother-daughter relationships that started long before her and will continue well after: “You’re not a perfect person / Something’s always wrong / But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mum.”
That latter track tackles another shadow that looms over the record, too. “You always had a reason to comment on my body,” Teitelbaum recalls, one of several references to a struggle with body image across the album. Sometimes she’s plagued by these thoughts (“Part of me still sits at home in a panic over 15 pounds,” she admits on ‘Event Of A Fire’), sometimes she conquers them. “I won’t lose my body if I get a belly,” she declares on the swirling ‘Toy’. “I’ll just roll around and feel it like a boy.”
The past’s impact on the album doesn’t stop at its lyrics. Although not a million miles from the sound of Blondshell’s debut, ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ mines a particular palette of ’90s rock, the murky, grungy guitars of Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden driving the likes of ‘Arms’ and ‘He Wants Me’. Elsewhere, ‘Two Times’ ripples with The Cranberries’ influence, and ‘Thumbtack’ strips things back to intertwined acoustic guitars, gently cushioning a tale of falling back on toxic guys to save you from yourself.
After the success of her first album, Teitelbaum was faced with a challenge. Its songs hit so hard because they felt like you had lived them just by listening. How could she capture that same emotional punch but without oversharing and putting every detail of her life up for public consumption? ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ is the answer, still as sharp and impactful but focused more on the spaces in between her stories than the plots themselves.
