New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Blondshell (Sabrina Teitelbaum) has announced the May 2, 2025 release of her highly anticipated sophomore album, If You Asked For A Picture, via Partisan Records. Returning to the studio with producer Yves Rothman, the project brims with an urgency, ambition, and devastating potency hinted at on Blondshell's 2023 self-titled debut, the specificity, self-examination, and nonchalant humor of which turned her into one of the most lauded new artists in recent memory.
Fans can get a taste of the new album in the form of the crushingly catchy accidental love story "T&A," the video for which was directed by Hannah Bon and features three rescue dogs (Luna, Rooster, and Radar) matched with male counterparts. It's a nuanced take on the "men are like dogs" adage and an exploration of the idea that the dogs with the loudest barks are the ones that are the most afraid, exposing a vulnerability deep within the surface of a tough exterior.
Teitlebaum says "There's a Rolling Stones song on Tattoo You called 'Little T&A' and at one point in the song, he says 'tits and ass,' so I'm borrowing that. I think in music, it's easy to see things as either more sexualized or more romantic, and I wanted this to be both. I see it as a love story - maybe not the most fairy tale love story - but I wanted it to feel like a really narrative song, where one thing leads to another and then you end up somewhere you didn't expect. Normally that's not how I write, but I wanted a song like that."
Teitelbaum previously shared another album track "What's Fair," which Billboard said "fulfills the Blondshell promise and even evolves it to a new level of excellence" and Rolling Stone called a "cathartic rocker … sonically harks back to Nineties alt-rock and SoCal pop punk, with a sunny melody masking darker lyrics."
If You Asked For A Picture's title borrows its title from a 1986 poem by the cherished American writer Mary Oliver, titled "Dogfish." In it, Oliver grapples with the idea of telling one's own story: how much to share, how much to keep for oneself — all questions Teitelbaum asked herself while writing the forthcoming LP. "There's a part of the poem that says: 'I don't need to tell you everything I've been through. It's just another story of somebody trying to survive,'" Teitelbaum says. "Something I love about songs is that you're showing a snapshot of a person or a relationship, and showing a glimpse into a story can be just as important as trying to capture the entire thing. Sometimes it's even truer to the entire picture than if you tried to write everything down."
If You Asked For A Picture is alive with a more vital nuance both sonically and thematically, gesturing towards a deeper autobiographical story that taps into something painfully universal without being too overt. Teitelbaum explains, "The first record feels really black-and-white to me. This record has more questions."
In the studio, Teitelbaum found herself confident and at home like never before, trusting her instincts as she developed an almost telekinetic shorthand with producer Yves Rothman. The result is a record of astounding sonic range - including sky-scraping ballads and colossal hooks that soar over waves of distortion, mixing layered textures and harmonic flourishes, or making unexpected hairpin turns between them. Primary among her production touchstones were unexpected curveballs like Queens of the Stone Age's Rated R and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication. Teitelbaum reveled in appropriating those hyper-masculine aesthetics for her uncompromising examinations of young womanhood, playing with performances of gender in rock. "It's empowering for me to use sonic references that feel reserved for men," she explains.
Blondshell's self-titled 2023 debut unleashed a swiss-army-knife writing style that gets under your skin: songs that are as visceral and anthemic as pop music with all the specificity, self-examination, and nonchalant humor of the best indie rock — songs you want to let crash over you, even as their strength is too concrete to be washed away. The release garnered her critical acclaim and a devoted fan base, She has since toured relentlessly, playing 150+ shows including major festivals and a tour with Liz Phair, on top of her own sold-out headline dates. In Summer 2024, she made appearances at high profile festivals including Governors Ball, Glastonbury, and Lollapalooza. Rolling Stone remarked that her "shows reliably give a sense of catharsis to attendees, and to Teitelbaum herself."
In support of the album she performed on The Tonight Show and CBS Saturday and the album garnered countless year-end accolades and landed on Obama's Best Songs of 2023 list. In 2024, Blondshell released the standalone single "Docket" featuring Bully, which landed on NPR, Rolling Stone, and Esquire's top songs of the year, and she was featured on A24's Everyone's Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, covering the band's "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel".
In the time since Blondshell, the image of Teitelbaum's life has changed considerably. As the accolades accrued she spent more time on the road than at home. This rootlessness naturally impacted Teitelbaum's relationships with others and with herself. "When you travel a lot, you see different possibilities for who you can be," Teitelbaum says. "So there were a lot more questions coming up. What do I want my life to look like? Maybe it's just the nature of being two years older, but I'm more comfortable with nuance now, and I'm more comfortable with gray areas." There's an open-endedness to where If You Asked For A Picture lands: it's a no-skips, triumphant sophomore record that captures the unresolved process of figuring out who you are, too wise to suggest that it has a definitive answer.
