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May 02, 2025 Web Exclusive By Andy Von Pip

Blondshell’s self-titled debut from 2023 introduced Sabrina Teitelbaum as a songwriter of rare ferocity and wit, transforming bruised confessions into roaring, tightly honed anthems. She could have easily retraced those steps, but her sophomore album, If You Asked For a Picture, ventures into more intricate terrain. Teitelbaum writes in vivid flashes, snapshots, riddles, and half-spoken truths, stitching them into songs that feel whole—alive to every fragile, confusing, impossible possibility.

The bittersweet “Thumbtack” opens the album with blunt honesty: “Keep a ball chain on my leg / Keep fucking with my head.” It’s a perfect bridge between albums, as Teitelbaum turns her unflinching gaze toward the often chaotic nature of navigating love and life.

Previous single “T&A” takes its title from The Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You track “Little T & A,” with Teitelbaum nimbly balancing the sexual and the romantic. She crafts a love song (of sorts) that’s messy, tangled in contradictions, and teeters on the edge of unpredictability.

“What’s Fair,” originally released as a single in 2024, is quite simply magnificent and perfectly highlights Teitelbaum’s songwriting brilliance. It blends lyrical directness with a soaring, timeless melody that feels both urgent and expansive—a moment of pure release carried effortlessly by her unerring instinct for melody. It’s as close to perfect as a song gets.

Elsewhere, “23’s a Baby” blends anthemic pop with emotional depth, exploring generational trauma and parental relationships. Backed by girl-group harmonies and a stadium-sized sound, it still manages to feel intimate. The hook—“23’s a baby, why’d you have a baby?”—is both a question and a confrontation, capturing the tension between youthful vulnerability and the weight of parental expectations, a theme that subtly echoes throughout the album.

That emotional push-and-pull continues on “Two Times,” where Teitelbaum questions the well-worn trope often portrayed in films and TV—that love must be hard-won, turbulent, and even painful to be real. Instead, she examines a quieter, steadier version of connection: one that doesn’t require suffering to be valid. “How bad does it have to hurt to count?” she wonders, reframing love not as a battle, but as something that might just be enough as it is.

It’s tough to single out just one track from an album packed with standout moments, but “Change” is another sublime song—a grunge-infused take on Americana, at times almost reminiscent of Kurt Cobain, driven by coruscating distorted guitar licks. Then there’s “Event of a Fire,” which slowly crackles before it ignites, earning extra points for its Tony Soprano reference. Written during a tour, in the fog of exhaustion following a 4 a.m. hotel evacuation outside Boston, it simmers with tension. Teitelbaum’s vocals slice through the noise—raw, worn, and urgent—as she wrestles not with the usual pressures of performing, but with a deeper, more existential ache: “It’s not really, ‘What if I’m burnt out from touring,’ it’s like, ‘What if I’m burnt out from just existing?’”

This is a more mature, reflective record, built from fleeting moments and fragments that, when pieced together, carry real depth—an absent glance, a hand on a shoulder, the silence that follows an apology. The title, taken from Mary Oliver’s poem “Dogfish,” feels especially fitting: a reminder that even the most subtle gestures can conceal something deeper, without ever quite revealing the whole picture.

Throughout the album, Teitelbaum demonstrates a unique ability to capture the rawness of a moment. While her debut burst through a locked door, If You Asked For a Picture lingers at the threshold, reckoning with everything that’s flooded in. A central theme is control and the discomfort of surrendering it. That tension is keenly felt on the brooding, majestic “Toy,” which touches on Teitelbaum’s lifelong struggle with OCD.

Rather than offering neat conclusions, it’s an album in search of answers—and Teitelbaum leaves space for listeners to find their own meanings, fostering a deeper, more enduring connection than any straightforward narrative ever could. (www.blondshellmusic.com)

Author rating: 8.5/10