New Music Friday can be a lot. That's why every week we cut it down to the songs you need to hear for PLAY, our new music edit, and deliver a new cover feature to go alongside it. This week... Blondshell
A year ago, Sabrina Teitelbaum was in the UK touring her second record, 'If You Asked For A Picture'. That trip, one which saw her both play with Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park and her biggest headline shows on this side of the Atlantic, inspired the rapid-fire writing process that would ultimately become her third album, 'Violins'.
"Once you get that sort of sense that you've put a record out and you don't have any pressure to make something quickly," she posits, "for me, that tends to inspire a lot of writing. I like that sense of, 'Nobody's going to hear this'. I don't need to turn anything in, there's no clock: that's what makes me really able to write."
'Violins' finds Sabrina in the most personally stable position she's been since the first Blondshell album in 2023, which made clear that this was a project that was going to pull no emotional punches and lay bare all the trauma that she has experienced, all plastered in a wry smile and brilliantly blunt lyricism.
With her standing on less shaky ground, in a loving relationship both with her partner and, more importantly, herself, 'Violins' sees Sabrina explore what it means to be alive in the modern world in a personal, political, and professional sense. 'Two Fried' is essentially a love song to her own body, 'Reinstall' sees her reconsider her place within a friendship group that twists and transforms as lives take different routes, while 'Lucky' confronts the tension between consciously blocking out global horrors in order to simply keep your head above water.
"I feel like when you have more air in the room, and you're not fighting for your life emotionally, it's a lot easier to be in an observing state", she says.
"When people are struggling a lot, the focus tends to be, 'Okay, how do I survive? What's my circumstance? What's my situation right now?', and my experience has been that, when I am in a more solid place, more able to sort of ride the waves of things I didn't expect happening and whatever, I'm more able to look outward and observe other people, other things."
On 'Lucky' specifically, Sabrina confronts past and present events which have placed front and centre the torturous relationship that many Americans face in a nation that repeatedly pits neighbour against neighbour and culture against culture. References to the famous anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent State University in 1970 are placed alongside nods to the murder of a Ukrainian woman on a tram in North Carolina last year.
As someone who has overcome many past torments, for example, with mental health crises and her struggles with addiction, the chorus celebrates that, for Sabrina, her 'eternal sunny days arrived/and I'm not gonna test it'.
"After a shooting or, like, the most fucked up thing that can happen happens in the US, I have made that choice where I've been like, I can't feel this because I won't be able to just live my life; I can't sit with this. So, I have made that choice consciously to be like, 'I need to be desensitised in this moment, and I'll come back to the feeling'."
She adds, "There's just this really weird disconnect where, particularly in America, but everywhere, it's just getting uglier and uglier. I always felt like my life would get better as I got older – I do really believe that, and that has been the case so far – so for me to be becoming happier and my life becoming richer and watching all these things happen at the same time is this very weird dissonance, and I don't really know what to make of it."
'Lucky' is one of a handful of songs that Sabrina played at a pair of stripped-back shows, one of which took place at Rough Trade East, about half a mile from the Shoreditch studio where we catch up with her. Performing the songs as they were written, she noted on stage that this album is the most representative of where she is in life, maybe one of the reasons why she admits that she isn't feeling any trepidation about this new Blondshell chapter.
"I was nervous before my second record came out," she recalls, "I remember the day it came out and feeling like I wanted everybody to like it and all this stuff. I feel like I learned a lot from that experience, and I feel just excited."
"I work really hard on my music, and I work really hard on healing and my personal growth"
That the album came together so quickly, the release date around a year and a half since her second record, speaks to her own desire to act fast and strike while the iron is hot rather than sit back and hold out until she felt the industry was ready. She is as in tune with herself as she has ever been, and it's coming to fruition.
"If it didn't feel natural, I would have waited longer," she states.
"I think because of the genre and because of how I dress and all that stuff, it can appear a little bit slacker. But the truth is, I work really hard on my music, and I work really hard on healing and my personal growth. I have worked the last three and a half years on being able to cope with things better and liking myself more, and all of those personal things. I have felt a lot of days where I've been like, 'why am I working on any of this?', because we're back to where we were, but then you come back a week later, and you've recovered from it faster."
This sense of healing is the central thesis of the title track, 'Violins', a song which grapples with the desire to 'get better' in whatever way you can, but to get there faster than you ever could. Sabrina's expectations of herself, clearly dotted throughout her discography on tracks such as 'Tarmac', 'Change', or 'Model Rockets', are now less internal screams of despair at slow progress, more moments of nagging doubt that she has learned to dial out.
"That type of healing takes a lot longer than people expect – and it takes a lot longer than you see in TV shows and movies. I don't know that I've really felt other people telling me to hurry that up, but I definitely feel it from myself, so that song is me carving out the space that I need for myself. I struggle more with the internal pressure for things to do well or to work quickly, things like that. So, that song was me being like, 'Okay, hold on, what am I expecting from myself? How do I restructure that?'"
And what is it that she is expecting?
"I don't know," she says candidly. "I have dealt a lot with control and perfectionism and things like that and have worked to be okay with being less in control of things, because control is just kind of an illusion anyway. So, I'm just working on feeling like I'm okay with not leaning on that illusion."
While she grapples with existential themes of connection ('Knotted'), religion ('Sea Legs'), and changing relationships ('Heart Has To Work So Hard'), it wouldn't be a Blondshell record without dry humour, and nowhere is this more evident than in 'New Age Trojan Horse'.
A track about periods, it also acts as a kick in the balls for the performative male, one described in the song as 'with a book and a bag said sometimes I cry' who 'only buy the vinyl to keep the album alive'. It is a dismantling of microaggressions, which acts doubly as a takedown of men with Paul Mescal Syndrome, a very different but equally painful PMS.
"There's a whole spectrum of misogynists. There's obviously violence, and then there's also manipulators, but this was about a still annoying but not so dangerous type of misogyny, so I'm able to be funnier about it. And I was able to sort of just, I don't know, I was able to have more fun with it."
Thinking back to her Rough Trade show, where 'New Age Trojan Horse' made its debut, she says: "[The song] felt super light-hearted and fun to play. That whole show was really fun because it felt silly to me; it didn't feel so serious. It felt fun and funny, and the music can be so heavy, and the shows can be intimidating for me, and that didn't feel that way."
In many ways, 'Violins' contains the same ingredients as either of the previous Blondshell records, but it feels like an elevation on all fronts. Sonically, everything is in sharper focus: the drums crash harder, the guitar lines cling tightly to every note, the hooks land deeper. All of this points back to Sabrina's central belief: you don't have to reinvent yourself altogether, you just need to stick true to your goals.
"For musicians, you can usually hear where you want your music to go," she ponders, "and usually your taste develops a lot quicker than your skills as a writer and as a musician."
"For this record, when I wrote all the songs and started demoing, the only thing that I said was that I wanted to hit really hard. That's it."
"Then from there," she continues, "I didn't want to be stuck in the same boxes sonically that we were stuck in before.
"With the first record, we had such a clear mission statement: live recording, live band, rock record, here are the references, here are the parameters, and that worked for what it was. With the second record, I didn't want to have a change; I fight back against the idea that you have to evolve your entire artistry every time you make a record. This record ended up being pretty different because we wanted to try things we hadn't tried before. We wanted to try using samples and mini-Moog and different synths; there were different textures, and we were excited about that."
Ever since the self-titled debut, there has never been any doubt that Sabrina would manage to carve out the perfect niche in the scene for Blondshell. Tracks like 'Salad' showed her penchant for making smash-and-grab rock anthems, while her softer side has resolutely shone through in tracks like 'T&A' and 'Dangerous'. She has got this far by simply being herself. Why change the formula now?
Discussing what she wants the coming years to look like, she says: "Creatively, I want to make a lot of albums that feel genuine and don't feel forced or rushed or anything. I made these quickly because that was what was genuine to me, and I'm going to continue to make albums in the way that I need to."
"I'm pretty clear about the kind of life that I want for myself", she considers, "I always have felt like I just want to experience a lot of peace in my life, in my personal life, and good relationships – all the things that everybody wants. My hope is that both of these things – my music and my life – can live side by side."
Blondshell's album 'Violins' is out now.
