Album Review: If You Asked For A Picture by Blondshell

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.

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The sepia highlights and blue shadows of Teitelbaum's photo on the album cover -- as she lays on stomach with her chin resting on folded hands -- evoke the same nostalgic haze that permeates her music. Teitelbaum's pose and stoic expression model a fitting way for her listeners to approach the album: with tracks like "Thumbtack," "Change," and "Event of a Fire," If You Asked for a Picture crafts a bittersweet mood to space out to. The album is full of sonically gentle but emotionally cutting indie rock à la Phoebe Bridgers, Samia and Indigo De Souza, while also referencing the classic alternative rock of the '90s and early 2000s.

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Sabrina Teitelbaum’s easy-on-the-ear second album reveals a subtler, more nuanced approach to raw emotions The second album from Sabrina Teitelbaum in her guise as Blondshell finds her continuing to reflect on life. This time around, her approach is slightly more guarded than on her self-titled debut, but dig beneath the surface and there’s more than enough to keep most therapists busy for some time. Perhaps part of it is that, even though it’s only a couple of years between albums, her outlook has changed somewhat.

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For her sophomore effort, If I Asked For A Picture, Blondshell borrowed a line from that poem to title her album. It's a fitting point of inspiration for an album centred around change - navigating relationships in disrepair, seeking to draw a line under past mistakes and looking to the future while keeping an eye on the past. Across 12 tracks, reflections of fractured adolescent parental relationships, past experiences of addiction and eulogies for imbalanced romances are given voice over infectious, chugging indie-rock arrangements and rendered with humour and striking honesty by Sabrina Teitelbaum.

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Blondshell’s If You Asked For a Picture is one of the most overtly polemical and confessional albums since Hole‘s Celebrity Skin. A cascade of riffs is interspersed with lyrical portraits of characters experiencing distress fueled by societal expectations and an unhealthy dependency on alcohol. Sometimes, for variety, Blondshell lets the vocal harmonies do the heavy lifting, as heard in the closing, almost a cappella-oriented seconds of “Arms”.

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A quick scan through popular music history shows that many of the all time great albums have been made by those in the middle part of their decade on the planet. There are similarly many examples where the second album is not always the reputedly difficult one, but rather the moment where the ideas and energy of the debut coalesce into the artist's finest work. Choose your own examples, but think 'Paul's Boutique', 'The Bends', 'Nevermind', 'Like A Virgin', 'Bandwagonesque', 'Rid of Me', and 'Da Real World' from the later part of the last century – not always fully appreciated at the time but, to varying extents, all durable, mythologised and loved decades later.

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In the two years since releasing her self-titled Blondshell debut, Sabrina Teitelbaum has not just broken out from the underground, but propelled herself to repeated (and lauded) late night television appearances, landed in both the US and UK Top 100, and sold out shows across the globe - both as headliner and supporting the likes of acclaimed superstar Liz Phair. Her sophomore release, 'If You Asked For A Picture', goes some way in showcasing the vast increase in confidence these experiences and accolades have afforded her, forging an album filled with candid takes on relationships, family, and emotional turbulence wherein Sabrina highlights her comfort with existing in the grey. That uncertainty unfolds in theme alone, but never in sound.

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