FEATURE: Spotlight: Blondshell — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Brissett for The Line of Best Fit

Blondshell

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I could have sworn…

PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Topete for DAZED

I had included the magnificent Blondshell in a Spotlight feature before. I love the string of singles she released last year. Each with incredible cover art (largely in black-and-white), the New York artist is stunning. These are early days for her but, in such a short time, she has been tipped by so many people to be among the elite artists who will rule and strike hard throughout this year. The amazing artist (Sabrina Teitelbaum) was interviewed through last year. I will bring in a few of those, as I hope it will help you geta wider and bigger picture of her music and background. Based in Los Angeles, I think that Blondshell is going to be this solo incarnation that lasts for many years. I know that Blondshell is touring very soon. Supporting the brilliant Suki Waterhouse, she had dates around North America. Happily, she comes to the U.K. in May. She plays Brighton’s Great Escape Festival., and she heads to Europe before coming back to the U.K. later in the month. You can check her dates here and go and order a ticket if she is playing near you. I want to see her play London, as it will be remarkable to witness the reception this wonderful and hugely promising young artist will receive. For this DAZED interview from December, Blondshell shares her ultimate break-up playlist…but she also talks about rage and relationships:

“Sabrina Teitelbaum had no idea how angry she was before she began writing as Blondshell. An exercise in uninhibited creativity initiated during lockdown, the NYC-raised alt-rock artist suddenly found herself accessing all the ugly, inconvenient truths she’d suppressed in previous musical projects.

“Before that I had always thought I was being personal,” the 25-year-old singer-songwriter says of the transition today, speaking over Zoom from her apartment in LA. “But it takes a certain amount of confidence and desperation to write about really personal things. So I was like, these are just gonna be my diary songs that nobody’s gonna hear.”

Unrepentant candour has quickly become Teitelbaum’s calling card. Launching Blondshell back in June, the slow smoulder of “Olympus” detailed a romantic infatuation exacerbated by substance abuse, and arrived prefaced by the weary assertion, “I’d still kill for you.” Follow-up “Kiss City” saw her demanding intimacy in lines like, “Just look me in the eye when I’m about to finish.” Better still was “Sepsis”’ jaded opening gambit, “I’m going back to him / I know my therapist’s pissed,” which set up the barbed kiss-off, “We both know he’s a dick.”

“That was a thing that happened,” Teitelbaum chuckles, offering a glimpse of the self-lacerating humour that so often bleeds into her songwriting. “Like, therapists typically don’t share those kinds of opinions, but it was just so obvious she hated him. And I don’t think I would have been able to write these songs had I not been having these discussions every week with my therapist.”

Teitelbaum had been performing for more than a decade before her creative breakthrough. Growing up in Midtown Manhattan, songwriting had always been her default mode of expression – a passion fostered in early childhood after being introduced to the work of David Bowie, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones by her father, and later nurtured via artists like Feist, PJ Harvey and Adele. During high school she was in and out of a succession of bands (including one with classmate Blu DeTiger), using a fake ID to play open mic nights on the Lower East Side.

Looking back on the period now, she experiences little to no nostalgia. “I had a hard time in high school and music was my hideaway,” she shrugs. “And the energy is so heightened in New York – there’s just, like, this tunnel vision.” Seeking some respite, she uprooted her life to LA at the age of 18, majoring in Songwriting at USC. By the time she dropped out in her sophomore year, Teitelbaum had found her musical tribe: a tight-knit community of like-minded queer artists, also featuring fellow Partisan-signee NoSo.

There were solo outings before Blondshell – most notably BAUM, which sat somewhere on the soul-pop spectrum – but it’s through this project that Teitelbaum has finally learned to consolidate all facets of her personality. She recalls, “I started showing the songs to my friends, and everybody just responded being like, ‘Oh, now this is you as a person.”

On her forthcoming full-length debut, Teitelbaum spares nobody, least of all herself. Recorded in and around LA with her long-time collaborator Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Sunflower Bean), with reference points including The Cure, Interpol, Hole’s Live Through This and Butch Vig’s production on Siamese Dream, subject matter includes heartbreak, grief, addiction and social anxiety. Though she’s not keen on revealing the specific context behind some of the songs, she concedes to being floored by the fury the songs illuminated”.

Having been responsible for a couple of my favourite tracks from last year, I have been intrigued reading about Blondshell and her music. Whereas Sabrina Teitelbaum has made music in the past and been quite active, Blondshell is this new phase and sense of revelation. Able to make the music she has always wanted, songs like Sepsis and Veronica Mars are enormously powerful and pure. This is an artist whose lyrics make you think – and they provoke so many different emotions. We get a sense of this when The Line of Best Fit chatted with Blondshell in December:

“I’m going back to him / I know my therapist’s pissed,” she plainly declares on her song “Sepsis”, an admission of defeat. The treatment she accepts in a relationship spreads through her self-worth like rot as she tries to untangle the riddle of herself through the lens of someone else. “And I think I believe in getting saved,” she sighs in a streak of masochism, “Not by Jesus, validation in some dude’s gaze / And I think I believe in getting saved / Holy water pull my hair right from the base.” But there came a point where Teitelbaum couldn’t force herself to swallow this long-brewed resentment. She’s spitting it out.

Blondshell, the alias of her latest project, is a vehicle for female rage. When she wiped the slate clean and announced her debut single, “Olympus”, the caption of her Instagram post read: “It’s the music I’ve always wanted to make but was too scared to”. But what is fear when there are scores to settle?

The story takes place in the Californian hills of Mount Olympus, named for the Greek home of the gods. It’s a love story with a death drive, careening towards oblivion. The relationship is defined by toxins: the dizzying highs and the cold-sweat lows, where the lines between the enabler and the addiction itself are blurred. The guitars are slow-burning, almost laconic, like the West Coast summers of your imagination – and so is her voice, until it cracks wide open with a human ache: “Baby wanna erase this / You’re not shameless / I’m afraid of your description that I’m fitting when I’m faded”. But this is not a song about them; it’s a song about Teitelbaum running into the blaze to safe herself.

PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Brissett for The Line of Best Fit

“It was a painful era,” she reflects. “That era was really chaotic.” Her life had no direction, the days beginning and ending with no definable middle. It was only until she disentangled herself from that unhealthy relationship that she had the clarity to write about it. “There’s so much more to a relationship than you’re able to say in three minutes,” she explains. “I think, growing up, I was always kind of hesitant to express my emotions. Except in music. The music became the place where I would get all my emotions out. That’s why people have described my music as ‘intense’, ‘heavy’… stuff like that. I think that makes sense, because so much gets channelled to that space, for me.”

There is an old trope of New York City that its people are harsh, direct – unafraid to say exactly what they mean. Teitelbaum is the first to admit that as far as she’s concerned, it’s true. I ask if her music is always rooted in reality: “Yes”. So Blondshell doesn’t represent a persona? “No.” Her lyrics are unambiguous. “I was never able to write figuratively,” she admits. “That concept is so hard, like, people who write metaphors in their music. I think it’s awesome, but it’s just not my skillset. My songs are all pretty literal.”

Before writing “Olympus”, she was still tethered to her previous project, Baum, which she started as a teenager. She came of age in the era of bedroom demos, cutting her teeth by uploading covers of 1975 tracks to SoundCloud. “I just didn’t really know who I was,” she recollects. “I think I was figuring a lot out – and I still am. It just got to the point where I lost sight of the music I grew up listening to.” When the COVID-19 pandemic splintered her momentum as Baum, she was forced to confront realities about herself that she could’ve otherwise ignored. That sound, something far more pop-driven, felt two sizes too small – so she picked up her guitar. The time she spent with it led her back to the beginning: the albums that ignited the spark that took her this far in the first place.

It was the unbridled rage of Hole, in all their violent contradiction; the measured wit of Fiona Apple and the torn-at-the-edges rock of PJ Harvey, who had the greatest influence on Blondshell. “They were young women figuring out who they are. And they were angry. They sang about it in a way that still has a sense of humour, despite how dark things are,” Teitelbaum explains. “Because things are fucking dark and hard sometimes when you don’t know who you are yet. I can’t wait to be, like, fifty. I can’t wait – because why not? Everyone looks so much calmer, happier and more confident. I think it’s scarier to really show who you are in your music instead of trying to be somebody else.”

Blondshell was about daring to embrace the rage her progenitors embodied in their music, which to a male ear, has historically equated to a kind of madness. With “Sepsis”, in particular, she says, “I was fucking pissed.” She begins to explain that, “With ‘Kiss City’, there’s this vulnerability which was so scary for me, like, ‘I’m going to take this step and say this thing that’s embarrassing and necessary’, and then there’s the other side of it, which is like, ‘I’m so fucking mad, and I did not get what I deserved - and I’m going to scream about it for the first time”.

There will be a load of interviews with Blondshell this year. Seeing as she is touring very soon and there will be more music, there will be this extra material, fascination and another step. Before an album, many more fans will come the way of the New York-raised artist. It seems songs such as Kiss City and Sepsis were an act of catharsis and emotional exorcism for Teitelbaum. Explaining to THE FACE that she didn’t expect people to hear them, she wrote them alone in her apartment. I think that so many people will be deeply excited about the thought of a potential debut Blondshell album:

“This week, the 25-year-old known as Blondshell released her new single, Veronica Mars, a simmering, guitar-laden rebuke to how films and TV shows can condition kids to grow up too fast. “Veronica Mars /2004 /I am disturbed /Gimme shelter,” she sings languidly, before the song erupts into a full-blown rock ballad.

It turns out Teitelbaum is quite the student of satisfying sonic build-ups. Before Veronica Mars came out – the first track she’s released under Partisan Records, also home to IDLES and Fontaines D.C. – she self-released three anthemic tracks, all of which start off slow before crescendoing into powerful vocals and scuzzy guitar riffs.

All of this bodes well for a potential debut album, we say. For now, Teitelbaum’s been booked to play next year’s Primavera Sound festival in Madrid and Barcelona, and she’ll support model and musician Suki Waterhouse on the US leg of her tour before heading out for a string of solo shows across the UK and Europe next spring.

10% Where were you born, where were you raised and where are you now based?

I was born and raised in New York. I’ve been living in LA for the last six years.

20% What kinds of emotions and experiences influence your work?

A lot of the heaviest, most intense things I feel are what show up in my music. That can be any emotion: anger, sadness, feeling overwhelmed. What doesn’t come up a lot is happiness. I’ve always thought of music as a therapeutic outlet. If I’m feeling great about something, I don’t feel any urgency to write about that, because I’m busy living it. Also it ends up being cheesy.

30% If you could travel back in time to see an iconic music act perform, who would it be?

The Cranberries in ’95, when their first two albums were out”.

100% What can artists do to help save the world?

I think artists have the power to make people feel like it’s OK to feel really big feelings and express them. It takes the shame out of really big emotions, which is so important. That’s what music did for me”.

Undoubtably an artist that is going to grow and keep releasing such incredibly important music, this is someone who bares their soul. In return, there is so much affection and respect for Sabrina Teitelbaum. As Blondshell, she is a name that everyone should follow and cherish. I am excited to see what comes from her this year. Touring North America and Europe, we will get to see her in the U.K. soon. There are so many wonderful and enormously talented emerging artists coming through right now. There is no doubt that Blondshell is…