Blondshell sidesteps expectations on If I Asked For A Picture

For her sophomore effort, If I Asked For A Picture, Blondshell borrowed a line from that poem to title her album. It’s a fitting point of inspiration for an album centred around change – navigating relationships in disrepair, seeking to draw a line under past mistakes and looking to the future while keeping an eye on the past. Across 12 tracks, reflections of fractured adolescent parental relationships, past experiences of addiction and eulogies for imbalanced romances are given voice over infectious, chugging indie-rock arrangements and rendered with humour and striking honesty by Sabrina Teitelbaum.

Teitelbaum’s 2023 debut as Blondshell evoked the lo-fi debut of her musical hero Liz Phair – not just in terms of sound, but in Teitelbaum’s ability to capture the vast, complex array of emotions and experiences that come with adolescence and entering one’s early twenties. She captured mutually destructive romance on “Olympus”, female rage on the blistering “Salad”, falling in with the wrong crowd of “Dangerous” and navigating addiction, recovery and friendship on “Sober Together”. To listen to Blondshell, the album, was to watch many years pass by in a matter of minutes.

But as Elvis Costello famously told Creem Magazine in 1981, “you have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one”. Less than two years after her introduction to most listeners, Teitelbaum returns with her own take on how to navigate the well-documented difficulties of the sophomore record – looking to maintain the intimate, heart-on-sleeve songwriting of her debut, while expanding her sound to create arena-worthy anthems.