Blondshell On 'If You Asked For A Picture' & Writing About Sex

The cover of Blondshell’s sophomore album If You Asked for A Picture is fairly straightforward: a purposely grainy photo of singer Sabrina Teitelbaum in repose, her latest tattoo, a small fish, on display (“There’s no meaning; it’s just a cute little fish”). There’s no hidden meaning, no bullsh*t, just Teitelbaum front and center — that’s the point. “The reason why I chose the album cover that I chose is because I felt like it looked the most like me,” Teitelbaum says.

When we connect on Zoom — Teitelbaum from her Los Angeles home, just back from tour rehearsals — it’s exactly one week from the release of If You Asked For a Picture, out May 2. As the follow-up to her acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, the new record shows off a bigger sound, with the lyrics tackling even bigger thoughts. “The last album was so definitive, and it was just like, ‘I hate these people that are around me.’” she says. “And this one was more like, ‘What am I going to do about it?’"

The new album comes with all the accouterments to make a huge case for Blondshell Summer: late-night appearances, a headlining world tour, and bold-font appearances at music festivals like All Things Go and Mad Cool Festival. But first, she has to get through release day. “I don't feel the pressure when I'm writing, and I don't really feel the pressure come up when I'm recording. But I feel it in all the other moments,” she says. “It's impossible not to. If you give a sh*t about what you're doing, it's impossible to not want people to care. These are all the most personal things in the world to me. I put everything of myself into the album. I work super hard, so there's no world in which I could be chill about if people like it or not.”

One week to album release, how are we feeling?

I'm really excited to put it out.

You feel ready?

Yes, dude. I told [my manager] Shira, "It feels like I'm 10 months pregnant, waddling around holding this thing in my belly that I've been ready to get out, and it's kicking." I love putting out singles. It's great to be able to show people little tastes of the album, but it's so meant to be a whole album.

Listening to the album straight through, the singles blend right into the rest of the record, which is not always the case.

I'm glad. It's meant to be one thing, so I'm really excited for it all to be out, and then I'm excited to go play it on tour.

It feels like a record meant to be heard live.

It's so meant to be played live. There was so much intention when we were recording about how it would translate.

Do you also think about how it sits next to your debut record? Do you want there to be a through line, or do you view this as a new opportunity to do something different?

I think it's both. I wanted it to be really similar to the last album, but then we just... I don't know. With the last album, I was a little bit limited by the fact that it was my first time, so I was not so willing to try new stuff. I was more willing to try different things on this album because I just felt more solid in the studio.

The sound feels bigger on this one, for sure.

Yeah, it's bigger, and it just spans different things in a way the last one didn't. And I feel really proud. I really liked the last one. This is a different thing. At the end of the day, it's always about the songs, and I think that the way we choose to lift the songs up can be different — album to album, song to song — but it's always for the sake of lifting up the story.

Is there a theme in terms of the songwriting on this one?

There were a lot of questions happening on it, because I had a lot of questions coming up in life ... This one was more like, "Oh, I have the element of choice in my life, so what choices am I going to make, and what kind of person do I want to be, and what kind of person do I want to be in a relationship with?" So much of the last album was like, "I'm finding myself in bad relationship situations," and with this, it was looking at why.

Did you find the answers?

I found a lot of confidence in writing. I don't know that I found yes or no answers to things because I think the kinds of questions that I was asking are questions that don't have such concrete answers. If I had an answer to any of those questions, it's subject to change for the rest of my life.

For a really long time, I was sort of unwilling to look at how being a woman working in music, playing shows, all this stuff, actually affected me. It became kind of undeniable and talk about it more on this album. That barrier of "I refuse to address this" came down in my personal life, and it came up a lot in the writing.

What were some of those things about being a woman in music that you had been avoiding acknowledging?

I think it's just mostly in the live space, and I don't just mean for performers, but seeing how women get treated at venues. It's a whole thing with mosh pits; how women get treated in the context of a mosh pit is really dangerous and often violent. Just the lack of care for other people's bodies... and I had not really thought about that as much, since it's not something that I have seen at my shows, because people don't mosh at my shows. Imagine?

Maybe with the new music?

You know what? Maybe. But I think in my personal life, for whatever reason, that big barrier came down, and it became this whole thing for me the last couple years. I started to see it everywhere, and it just came up a lot more on the music. When you're confronting body image stuff, which comes up so much on the album, it's impossible to separate that from misogyny.

Now that your oeuvre is growing, there are already hallmarks we’re seeing of a Blondshell lyric: hyperspecificity, unafraid to drop a proper noun. Is that intentional?

Not really, because it's mostly just how I talk. There's just no difference between how I speak to you in this conversation and how I am writing at home.

The lyrics on this album are also very sexy, without leaning cheesy, which is so hard to do.

That's the biggest compliment ever.

It’s hard to write about sex!

So hard. Everyone's relationship with sex is... I mean, it's one of the most complicated relationships we have in our life, figuring out our sexuality, and I don't mean, like, "Am I gay or straight?" but our relationship with sex.

The title comes from a Mary Oliver poem. Did that come before you started writing the music or after?

It came after I wrote the album, but during the process of recording it. I like the title because with songs, since they're so short — it's like three, four minutes — you're just never going to get the entire story. It's one person's perspective, so you're not hearing something holistic, and it's not objective, and it's just a little piece. I like the idea of songs as little pictures and little snapshots.