Words by Paige Daniel
Sabrina Teitelbaum’s sophomore album, If You Asked For a Picture, is sung by someone emerging from the fog. Heavy guitar paired with a switch between deadpan vocals and bright, melodic pleas, Teitelbaum is equal parts explanatory and exploratory of how vulnerability, control, and sympathy play into her relationships.
The album’s title is borrowed from a Mary Oliver poem, “Dogfish,” which contains the line: “nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason.” Blondshell’s album seems to orbit around this idea, pondering to what degree our trauma is worth consideration, especially as people are cruel. And while Blondshell’s titular album released in 2023 certainly marked the band as unafraid to highlight love’s uglier aspects (“Olympus,” “Tarmac”), If You Asked For a Picture seems to be born of complete shattered illusion. Gone is the fun and hopefulness found in “Kiss City” and “Veronica Mars,” leaving twelve weighty tracks in its wake. Blondshell’s sound is grungier, their mood darker and even its tracks feel slower, assessing — though it maintains the band’s slot in the pop-rock genre. An optimism appears to be lost as its lyrics reflect on how misogyny, baggage, and self-view have been fated to intertwine in the making of decisions the singer comes to regret. As a result, the album never seems to stop drifting between accusation and questioning.
This culminates in the songs “What’s Fair” and “23’s a Baby,” in which the singer reflects on how having a largely absent mother shaped her view of love and self. This missing piece in her upbringing becomes a root for many of the experiences she unpacks in the rest of the album. On “Man,” the album’s eleventh track, Blondshell sings about a teenage relationship with an older man, misplacing expectations on someone who was ultimately taking advantage: “I got a lot of free reign, and cocaine, and pretty clothes, and shifty goals, but I needed the world from you.”
These types of men — seedy, cruel, demeaning — are a pattern for Blondshell, in both song and romantic history. In the album’s second single and a personal favorite, “T&A”, a man reduces his interest in her down to her tits and ass. In “Arms,” Blondshell describes a boyfriend so inept she feels she must care for him more as a mother than a partner. The singer seems to have countless stories of men as mean as they are sad, yet can’t seem to stop herself from wanting them to want her. The album’s opening track, “Thumbtack” aims to explain the repeated presence of these thorns in her side early on, describing such men as a lesser evil compared to what lives inside the singer’s head: “A dog bite, you distract from what’s worse, so I will let you.” The result of these patterns is love forged in pain, as recited over wailing guitar and heavy drum tracks. As Teitelbaum questions in “Two Times,” “How bad does it have to hurt to count?”
However, through the songwriting on this album, its inherent act of documenting these mistakes, Blondshell seems to realize it might not have to hurt at all. While Blondshell (2023) expressed a conflicted desire for destructive habits and people, If You Asked For A Picture (2025) feels more self-aware in these choices, describing them without thrill, but a clarity towards what led to them. She extends sympathy towards both herself and the people that have hurt her. The result is a maturation in both sound and theme. Blondshell as a band is making their mark in the world of haunted girl rock that doesn’t let behaviors of bad men breathe. A quality of resignedly calling people out weighs down If You Asked For A Picture’s tracks, reflective of the stories you hear from women everyday, the world we’re experiencing. The album doesn’t forgive, but it seems to understand enough to want a change — and that’s a start.
Loudspeaker Collective 