2023 Rookie of the Year Blondshell Stole Our Sardonic Hearts with Her Breakthrough Debut
The post 2023 Rookie of the Year Blondshell Stole Our Sardonic Hearts with Her Breakthrough Debut appeared first on Consequence.
Our 2023 Annual Report marches on with the announcement of Blondshell as our Rookie of the Year, an accolade given to an artist we feel broke out with a major statement in 2023. Stay tuned for the rest of our annual report, detailing the best music, film, and television of the year. Check it all out here.
You can also listen to our full conversation with Blondshell’s Sabrina Teitelbaum on the latest episode of Consequence Uncut, available wherever you get your podcasts.
For all their crunchy guitars and raw vocals, there was a relaxed confidence in many alternative rock stars of the ’80s and ’90s. Sabrina Tietelbaum brings a similar paradoxical vibe to her music as Blondshell; as she discusses the grungy songs of toxic habits and self-sabotage on her self-titled breakthrough, she’s at once graciously humble and wildly self-assured. Both Teitelbaum’s attitude and personality-driven songwriting almost bring to mind a young Liz Phair — quite fitting given that, as she calls Consequence from a Minneapolis hotel room, she’s in the midst of a tour with Phair.
“I’ve respected her and looked up to her for a really long time,” says Teitelbaum of Phair. “I remember the first show, maybe 10 days ago… we’re packing up and I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go listen because I love this song’ I kept wanting to go back and watch.”
It’s easy to see why Blondshell makes so much sense as an opener to the Welcome to Guyville 30th anniversary tour. Like Phair, Teitelbaum’s songs boast a vulnerable urgency, like the singer might spontaneously combust if she doesn’t deliver brutally emotional lines like, “You’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl.” Along with gut-punch dynamics, wailing guitar lines, and earworm melodies, such ethos serve as the bedrock for the electrifying Blondshell, a record that takes from indie’s past to chart its future.
The journey to the LP was much longer than even the year-long release rollout indicates. Growing up in New York, Teitelbaum knew she had the rocker spirit in her, but she hadn’t quite worked out all of the details. “I was always kind of drawn to guitar, but when I was a kid, we had a piano. So, I started by playing piano, and that was kind of my main instrument,” she recalls.
With the six-string on the back-burner, Teitelbaum initially took a different path into the music industry. She first released electro-pop under the name BAUM, a project that scored a viral hit with “Fuckboy” in 2019. But something just didn’t feel right; perhaps it was the typical growing pains of coming into one’s artistic self, or maybe Teitelbaum just realized it wasn’t where her heart was. “I’m not a pop girlie in terms of what I listen to,” she i-D, “so it made sense there was always a disconnect.”
So, when lockdown hit and Teitelbaum found herself with an abundance of time on her hands, she took the opportunity to treat that spiritual dissonance with a little sonic dissonance (insert the wonderfully chaotic guitar solo from “Veronica Mars” here).
“In COVID, I was like, ‘I really want to get better at guitar — that’s gonna be my whole goal for COVID,’ because there was so much boredom. ‘Whenever I’m bored, I want to just try to get a little bit better,'” she explains. “It was something that I really leaned on when I was having a hard time in COVID. It was like a crutch for me. So, I was listening to a lot of guitar from the ’80s, and some ’90s stuff too — a lot of Brit-pop — and ended up trying to study those songs on guitar.”
Much to the dismay of slackers everywhere, the studying paid off. She came out the other end with a collection of anthemic, pointed indie rock songs that nod to her influences while showcasing a perspective that’s all her own. The tunes range from gorgeous and lovesick (“Kiss City”) to catchy and explosive (“Tarmac”) to downright apocalyptic in their rage (“Salad”). All the while, she cuts through the layers of guitars with sardonic, tongue-in-cheek stanzas that out the listeners’ bad habits just as much as Teitelbaum’s. It’s visceral and, importantly, Teitelbaum to the core; in other words, it’s exactly what she was after.
The scene reacted accordingly, as buzz built with each subsequent single until the full album finally dropped. Not yet content, she went on to release several bonus tracks, make her late night debut on The Tonight Show, and share covers of The Cranberries and Sheryl Crow (she’s also been covering Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” in concert because, as she says, “Kathleen Hanna is the GOAT. So absolute GOAT”). Most prestigiously, she even stopped by Consequence to be the first-ever guest on Mixtapes! (Okay, maybe it’s not the most prestigious of all of her accomplishments, but we had a hell of a lot of fun with it.)
“This year has meant so much to me because it’s the first time that I put out a full album,” she tells Consequence. “It’s the first time that I put out music that I feel really proud of, that I can stand behind and be like, ‘This is actually who I am as an artist.'”
Closing out such a momentous year on the road with Phair couldn’t have been a more perfect bookend. Call it a cosign, the passing of a torch, or just a damn good bill, there’s something that just feels right about an uncompromising indie star on the rise sharing a stage with an uncompromising indie icon.
As for what’s next, Teitelbaum shows no sign of slowing down. With shows booked around the globe for 2024 and a sophomore effort already in the works, Blondshell has only begun its ascent.
“I’ve started writing, but it’s not done at all,” she teases. “I think something that I’ve noticed is that, with the last album, I was talking about a lot of bigger themes kind of funneled into dating. And there was a lot of, ‘I’m talking about relationships on the surface, but what I’m really talking about is self-worth.’ I think on the next album, the stuff that I’m writing now, it’s not as much through the lens of dating. It’s more the real, formative relationships that are underneath. Like, if you’re choosing to date people who aren’t so nice, like I talked about on the first album, the second album’s kind of like, ‘Why am I choosing that?'”
To hear why, in fact, she is “choosing that,” fans will have to wait and see. Whatever form that answer ultimately takes (likely a dynamic, sardonic, endlessly repayable tune), it’s bound to be Teitelbaum through and through.
In the meantime, you can find us here at Consequence scream singing along with “Salad” and keeping an eye out for the next round of live dates, eagerly waiting for a chance to exercise our emotions in person. We highly recommend you do the same.
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2023 Rookie of the Year Blondshell Stole Our Sardonic Hearts with Her Breakthrough Debut
Jonah Krueger
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