How Blondshell became a grunge icon for a new generation

In early 2020, Sabrina Teitelbaum was listening to a lot of 90s grunge: Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, all bands that she’d heard around the house growing up. But as a kid, she didn’t really “get it”. The music was loud, angry; the lyrics raw, and filled with angst. It wasn’t until she revisited records like Siamese Dream after a “situationship” breakup, that the era’s alt-rock really started to resonate on a deeper level. “I connected to those albums because of what I was going through, but I also think it was just a matter of growing up. I did a lot of maturing in a short period of time,” Sabrina says. “I’m getting older, and I’m figuring out who I am. This is more who I am.”

Though saying the year 2020 was challenging for everyone is an understatement, the solitude of lockdown led to Sabrina’s new music project: Blondshell. She was hiding out in her apartment in Los Angeles, processing the end of a relationship, “life changes, just a lot of things,” and scheduled a studio session. In it, she wrote “Olympus”, and though she had no intention of releasing the song, it anchors her debut album Blondshell, out now via Partisan Records. It’s a reeling, guitar-heavy track that explores toxic relationship dynamics, insecurities and self-loathing in unflinchingly honest terms. “I’d still kill for you / I’d die to spend the night at your belonging / All my friends think that I’ve lost it,” the song opens. It continues to reflect on the inability to walk away from an unhealthy hookup, which, well, we’ve all been there: “I wanna save myself, you’re part of my addiction / I just keep you in the kitchen while I burn.” 

“I really wasn’t in the habit of writing much at the time… I was kind of embarrassed because it’s weird to do sessions and then write stuff like that,” Sabrina says of the vulnerability that comes across in her lyrics. “I left and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I really like this. And it sounds nothing like the music that I’ve been making or have ever made.’”

Sabrina had spent the previous few years writing electro-pop songs with her band BAUM, inspired in part by her time in the University of Southern California’s pop music program — though she dropped out after two years — and the likes of Lorde and Lana Del Rey, but something was always a little bit off. “I’m not a pop girlie in terms of what I listen to,” she says, “so it made sense there was always a disconnect.” Encouraged by her friends and producer Yves Rothman, Sabrina kept writing within “the ‘Olympus’ world,” turning out a handful of songs that reimagined the 90s grunge rock she had on repeat for a new generation. But it was one navigating a dating world in which relationships looked nothing like we thought they would. Dodging exes, dealing with social anxiety at parties and experimenting with sobriety, all the while trying not to disappoint your therapist, were just a few of the albums’ many trending topics. 

Sabrina grew up in New York City, and was always obsessed with music. At around eight years old, she decided she wanted to write songs too. They didn’t make much sense at the time, but she kept at it through her teens and used songwriting to express anything and everything she was struggling with, at an age when talking about feelings felt awkward, embarrassing and like the last thing she’d wanted to do. “I didn’t keep a diary when I was a kid because I was like, ‘I’m so tough, I don’t have any feelings.’ That was just how I felt,” she says. “I didn’t talk about my emotions that much, but then it always came out in the songs.”

Her lyrics have always been incredibly personal and now, at 25, she still has to step outside of the studio when she’s recording to write them. “I have a hard time writing lyrics in front of other people,” she explains. “It just feels uncomfortable for me… The way Yves works, though, he doesn’t ask me about them. It’s definitely a conscious thing. He knows that the songs are really heavy, and not once when we recorded the album, was he like, ‘Are you okay?’ Or, ‘You know, this is really dark, I’m concerned.’” 

Sabrina finds catharsis in likening getting back together with “a dick” ex to an infection on “Sepsis”, where she sings, “He wears a front-facing cap / The sex is almost always bad / I don’t care ‘cause I’m in love.” She learns self-respect amongst its slinking guitars and anthemic chorus. Then there’s “Salad,” which sees the artist devise a plan to murder her friend’s abusive partner by putting poison in his salad. Sabrina has said that the track, which she premiered on The Tonight Show in fingerless gloves, was inspired by Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right” and Hole’s “Doll Parts” — as well as a twangy cover by Miley Cyrus — which made her want to write similarly unsettling songs from a place of anger. Plus, Courtney Love had a thing for writing in private, too.

“It was about a boy, whose band had just left town, who I’d been sleeping with, who I heard was sleeping with two other girls,” Courtney said of the song she wrote in a bathroom stall 20 minutes before a show. “It was my way of saying, ‘You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t choose me, and here is all the desire and fury and love that I feel for you.’”

This emotional intensity and eat-your-heart-out attitude that defined one of the 90s’ most divisive rockstars can be felt throughout Blondshell’s debut. On the standout track “Kiss City”, Sabrina sings, “Kiss city / Just look me in the eye / When I’m about to finish / Kiss city / I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty.” When she first wrote the somewhat explicit song, she thought she could hide it from close friends and family by blocking her stories; turns out, it’s the one that caught the attention of music critics and eager fans who saw themselves in her lyrics.

“I’d been at my friend’s house and I just felt inspired. We talk really openly about everything, and I was saying how it sucks that everybody just wants casual relationships. They don’t want to call it a relationship, and you’re clingy if you want anything meaningful,” she recounts. “I made a demo on my computer setup that I have at home and it was just gonna be a ballad, then it grew when I started recording it.”

Sabrina admits that she wishes not everyone had access to this song, since it makes it hard to set emotional boundaries with people, but when she played it at SXSW last month, the crowd shouted all the lyrics right back at her — even the ‘explicit’ ones she initially didn’t want her family to hear. The quiet-loud moments, which nod to her high school favourites like The Pixies and The Strokes, are meant to pose a question: should she feel ashamed, or proud, of expressing such intimate feelings so openly?

Some of the experiences that she’s singing about still feel fresh, but Sabrina’s no longer afraid of facing them or seeking validation. She hopes her album will let people know that it’s normal to be going through these things — shitty, early-twenties relationships, hangover spiralling the morning after the hangout, mentally plotting the hypothetical murder of someone you hate, etc. — it’s a confusing time to be coming of age. But, much like in the 90s, today’s chronically online youth are increasingly unhappy, and realising that many of the systems in place are no longer serving us. “What I want people to get [out of the record] is just an opportunity to feel everything they’re feeling,” Sabrina says. “I want to give people a truthful and accurate picture of what it looks like to be a young person being like, ‘Who am I? How do I feel better about things? How do I find relief from the crazy stuff that’s going on in the world?’”

Sabrina hasn’t found all of the answers, but in coming to terms with her feelings she’s become a grunge icon for those who are “always on the internet”, afraid to bring “the vibe down” (“Dangerous”) or who, simply, just “watched way too much HBO growing up” (“Joiner”). When I asked her if songwriting is better than therapy, she laughed, and said no. “Nothing can take the place of, like, really solid analysis.” But one can dream, right?

Credits

Photography Daria Kobayashi Ritch
Fashion Alex Assil