Partisan Records
Three years after a widely praised self-titled debut and two years after “If You Asked for a Picture,” Sabrina Teitelbaum returns as Blondshell with “Violins,” her third album. The record arrives this Friday, September 25, via Partisan Records, led by its title track, shared when the project was announced back in late June.
From a shelved alias to the indie spotlight
Born in New York in 1997 and raised in Manhattan, Sabrina Teitelbaum first tried her hand under the name BAUM, releasing an EP, “Ungodly,” in 2018. The project never quite fit her; in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, she stepped away from that alias and began writing what would become Blondshell, a name she landed on with her sister one night. The first single, “Olympus,” came out in June 2022, followed by a support tour with Suki Waterhouse, before her self-titled debut album landed on April 7, 2023, via Partisan Records — already produced by Yves Rothman. The record was critically acclaimed and turned up on several best-of-2023 lists.
Moving past bad romance
Blondshell’s first two albums were largely built around destructive relationships, territory she mined with unusual candor. “Violins,” eleven tracks produced by Yves Rothman, widens that frame: damaged friendships, the body, religion, and the bigger question of how to hold onto beauty while the world keeps handing you violence.
“I felt like I didn’t need to overexplain anything, like I can trust the people listening more,” she has said of writing the record. She has also pointed to images of patience and kindness that guided her while writing, and a pull toward the idea of healing slowly, refusing to be rushed by anyone.
Between the two self-titled records sits “If You Asked for a Picture,” released on May 2, 2025, its title drawn from a line by poet Mary Oliver. On it, Blondshell picked apart control, masculinity and her own relationship with her body, on songs like “Event of a Fire,” a kaleidoscopic account of a night gone wrong, or “T&A,” about the difficulty of intimacy while staying sober. “Violins” carries that exploration further but shifts its center of gravity: less about the inner mechanics of one person, more about how to stay whole against an outside world.
Guitars, groove and open influences
Musically, “Violins” leans into references that weren’t obvious touchstones for Blondshell before: the taut groove of Gang of Four, the straight-ahead melodicism of Teenage Fanclub and The Go-Betweens, even the soul smoothness of Sade. On the page, she reaches for Leonard Cohen and Pavement. Mixed by Beatriz Artola and mastered by Emily Lazar, the album has landed to strong early reviews from the English-language music press.
It’s a fitting pivot: where the first two Blondshell records leaned on raw confession, “Violins” trades some of that immediacy for songs built to hold up a full band on stage, which tracks with an artist who has spent the past three years almost constantly on tour.
A tour through the end of the year
Blondshell hits the road again in October for the “Scaring Strangers” tour, roughly twenty dates across North America, Europe and the UK running through December — further proof of how crowded, and how good, this year has been for guitar music led by women, alongside beabadoobee’s “Pylon” and Paris Paloma’s “The Fatal Flaw”.
With “Violins,” Blondshell makes the case that she’s not just the voice of a generation nursing bad romances — she’s a songwriter growing record by record, and for the first time, writing from a place that sounds a little more at peace.
