Amoeba Music

Blondshell celebrates her new album, If You Asked For A Picture (Partisan Records), with a live stripped-down set, meet & greet and vinyl signing at Amoeba Hollywood Tuesday, May 6th at 5pm!

To attend signing after the performance, purchase your copy of If You Asked For A Picture on vinyl beginning Friday, May 2nd in-store only at Amoeba Hollywood. 

Show is free/all-ages. Album purchase at Amoeba required to attend signing. Signing space is limited.

On tour:

5/2 at Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever

5/30 at The Fonda Theatre

Blondshell’s second album, If You Asked For A Picture, borrows its title from Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Dogfish,” in which Oliver grapples with how much of one’s story to share. “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,” Sabrina Teitelbaum explains. “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.”

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. If You Asked For A Picture expands these artistic horizons further, resulting in a collection of songs from an artist now at the peak of her powers that brim with an urgency, ambition, and devastating potency only hinted at until now.

The songs dig into familial relationships — parents who pass on their trauma (“23’s A Baby”), the endless two-way critique between mothers and daughters (the alt-rock daydream “What’s Fair”), and the loyalty of a sister who won’t forget how a man wronged you (the crushingly catchy accidental-love story “T&A”). A major theme is control — and the possibility of loosening her grip on it — including two songs (“Thumbtack,” “Toy”) that touch on Teitelbaum’s lifelong struggle with OCD. “The last record was a lot of, ‘You’re the villain in this situation, you’ve wronged me, and I’m really pissed,’” she says. “On this record it was more like: How did I get here? Maybe I’m the villain too.”

In the studio, Teitelbaum developed an almost telekinetic shorthand with producer Yves Rothman, resulting in a record of astounding sonic range. Drawing inspiration from curveballs like Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated R and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, Teitelbaum appropriates hyper-masculine aesthetics for her uncompromising examinations of young womanhood. “It’s empowering for me to use sonic references that feel reserved for men,” she explains. If You Asked For A Picture captures the unresolved process of figuring out who you are, too wise to suggest it has a definitive answer.