As Blondshell, Nothing Is Too Personal for Sabrina Teitelbaum

When talking about the music that she makes as Blondshell, Sabrina Teitelbaum says that what you hear is “100% of myself”. With her 2023 self-titled debut LP and its follow-up, 2025’s If You Asked For A Picture, the Los Angeles-based songwriter is equally known for 90s-evoking riffs and lyrical candour, and it’s the latter that gives the project its emotional weight and relatability.

“It’s really serious music because I’ve been through a lot,” says Teitelbaum. “It’s a lot of the parts of myself that are unspoken in daily life that make their way into the music. You’re not going to walk around talking about the heaviest, most serious things, but they’re still there with you all the time.

“So, there’s that in the music. But there’s also lightness, and I make jokes about things. There’s zero separation between me as a person and me as a musician. It’s just the same thing. I think it’d be really weird if it weren’t that way.”

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Teitelbaum grew up “singing all the time, almost as an instinct”. In hindsight, she identifies this as a form of “self-soothing… a coping mechanism”. When she discovered songwriting, it immediately clicked as an expressive outlet. “It was like: ‘Here’s where I’m going to talk about things that I don’t talk about in my daily life’.”

Teitelbaum cut her teeth with the more pop-based project BAUM, with which she released the 2018 EP, Ungodly. Feeling disillusioned with the pop path she’d taken, she began writing Blondshell’s songs as pure expression, unconcerned with populist appeal. That personal, cathartic quality is something she’s worked to maintain ever since.

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“I wrote most of my music as if nobody will hear it,” Teitelbaum explains. “So, I say a lot of stuff that either has some shame element to it or some private element to it. That’s painful or intimate or anything like that. Those are the parts of the music that people connect to the most.”

“I would never, ever, ever actually [say] ‘this is too personal, I’m not going to put this out’,” she continues. “I would just never do it. But I also know that I have that option. I can just use songs as a diary. Write them by myself, without having to put them out. So, when I’m by myself writing, I’m not scared of anyone else hearing what I’m doing.”

As Blondshell, Teitelbaum has worked through an array of super-personal subjects: struggles with substance addiction, toxic relationships and the sexualisation of women; balancing anger and humour as she’s spilled her heart over spiky riffs.

With the influence of Liz Phair, Hole, and the Smashing Pumpkins evident, there’s nary a Blondshell review that doesn’t cite the ’90s. But Teitelbaum isn’t a revivalist, which she sees as an important distinction. “I don’t think people think that I’m just that one thing,” she offers. “What I hear people say is: ‘this is a songwriter with some tones from the ’90s’. That’s fine with me.”

With her self-titled debut, Teitelbaum admits that she “couldn’t believe that [she] was making an album”. Her goals were simple: focus on playing up the strengths of each song and make a rock record. “I was listening to Hole all the time, so when I went into the studio I was like: ‘These are the guitar tones that I like,’” she says.

But with If You Asked For A Picture, her goals were to expand on what people expected from Blondshell. “I really wanted to show more of myself as an artist, that there were more sides of me than that were shown on the first record. That there was more range, more breadth and depth to me as a person, me as a writer and a musician,” she says.

As a writer, Teitelbaum forwards, her “only intention” for every song has always been: “‘I feel something right now, and I need to talk about it, because that will make it feel not as bad’.”

Making sense of her music and putting it in greater perspective is something that feels relatively recent for Teitelbaum. “Talking about the music, and talking about myself as a writer is still so new,” she says. “I have learned a lot about my records through talking about them. When people ask questions, sometimes you’re just like: ‘oh yeah, I didn’t think about that’.”

“You just make the music because you like it. Both albums, I just tried to make something that I liked. You make decisions because that’s what your taste is, because it sounds good or doesn’t sound good. You make decisions [without really] thinking about the bigger picture…

“But in terms of a recording, it’s a skill. I’m not a producer, but I can always make better choices in collaboration with my producer. How I can shape the recordings, shape the album as a whole, and think about the album as a medium – that’s changed a lot. From the first record to the second record to now.”

The newly released EP, Another Picture, is another way of creating context around Blondshell. Rather than thinking of this additional content as being the obligatory streaming-service ‘deluxe’ version, Teitelbaum was excited to include Berlin TV Tower, a track that arrived too late in the If You Asked For A Picture sessions to find a home, but is of the same time and place.

She also sought a range of artists for collaborations or cover versions, from indie legend Conor Oberst to rising Melbourne outfit Folk Bitch Trio and impossibly cool London rapper John Glacier. “I always love when other people do covers and collaborations, so I’ve always wanted to be in the position where I could do that with my songs,” Teitelbaum says. “Those are all artists that I really like, that I could hear on those songs. And lucky enough, they were down to do it.”

Blondshell will be following the LP/EP Picture double with their second Australian tour, two years after a trip around the country with the 2024 Laneway Festival. Though Teitelbaum laments that she “Hate[s] long plane flights”, that’s more than offset by how much she loves playing live.

“There’s a lot more fun and light-heartedness in the show,” she says. “There are moments that feel emotional to me, that feel sad, or that feel seriousness.

“But there’s just so much more joy in it… It makes me happy to play music and not have it just be me [on stage]. I love my band. I love them as people, and I love them as musicians. It just feels so good to be playing these songs with them.”

Blondshell will tour Australia in February 2026 with special guests total tommy. You can find tickets on the Frontier Touring website.

Presented by Frontier Touring