With songs about addiction and sobriety, praise kink, friend breakups, familial strife, body dysmorphia and, as she put it, “choosing to be in relationships with bad dudes,” Sabrina Teitelbaum has quickly earned a reputation for putting it all out there. But for a while, the singer and songwriter who records as Blondshell kept her career ambitions under wraps.
A born-and-raised New Yorker, Teitelbaum, 28, spent her high school years stomping around downtown Manhattan, singing original songs at open mic nights under a slew of aliases. Her musical life was “kind of private,” she said, waxing nostalgic during a walk along the High Line on a brisk but sunny March afternoon. “I didn’t really talk to people in my family about it. I didn’t talk to my friends about it.”
In town from her current home in Los Angeles, and braced for the elements in a zipped black anorak and Saint Laurent shades, Teitelbaum flew under the radar amid throngs of tourists in Chelsea. Her era of performing anonymously, however, at venues like Pianos and the erstwhile incubator Sidewalk Cafe, is over.
In 2022, her first single as Blondshell generated buzz that hearkened back to an earlier, blog-fueled era of indie-rock, and her subsequent self-titled debut earned fans and spots on many critics’ 2023 year-end lists for its grungy rock and frank, self-implicating lyricism. Now, on the cusp of releasing her second album, “If You Asked for a Picture,” on Friday, Teitelbaum is working out just how much more of herself to reveal to her growing audience.
“If You Asked for a Picture,” out May 2, builds on the themes Teitelbaum explored on her self-titled debut.Credit…Ariel Fisher for The New York Times
“All the things I was saying in the songs were things that I didn’t feel comfortable saying to people in conversation,” she said. “And I think that’s kind of still the case.”
