Album Review: Blondshell - 'Violins'
On her third album, Sabrina Teitelbaum - or as we know her, Blondshell - cries out on the opening title track: “Your battle song sounds like spit on a stranger, you don’t make promises you can’t keep. So you don’t make promises to me.” Something is immediately transparent. “This record’s heavy in a way,” Teitelbaum says. Running through the latest album’s 11 tracks is a bruising urgency, not long since the release of 2025’s sophomore project ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ but already with thunderous inclination is the sound of a maturing and evolving musician, expanding her worldview to put themes such as violence, religion, and troubled friendships, firmly in her iron sights.
“It’s gotten a little bit less literal,” she says. “There’s more imagery. But my main goal with this record was to have songs that hit hard. I wanted big lead lines.”. The title track with its crunching, buzzing guitar paints a picture of new found influences as colossal sounding guitarwork points towards a mix between Courtney Barnett and Gang of Four. ‘Heart Has To Work So Hard’ is a motoring track, it rises, falls, all the while Teitelbaum’s vocals swarm, reminding us all of the raw talent so abundantly on display.
Continuing onwards, ‘Lucky’ is a fantastic change of pace, Teitelbaum’s ability to put it in reverse and subvert expectations after a frantic opening salvo. Perfectly hazy, channeling an indie-pop influence you’ve fallen in love with countless times over the years, but never sick to death of. ‘Sea Legs’ takes another glorious left turn, it’s shimmering, divine, transcendent, conjuring from a synth-pop and dream-pop influence, there’s a telling lyrical reference to Leonard Cohen, “And Gio is an argument and when it starts to rain and Leonard Cohen writing about the flame”, top marks for homage to the one and only himself.
‘Two Fried’ is deceptive, a light and energetic riff disguises aching tension as a metaphor about liking eggs is used to revel in the feeling of simply liking one's body. ‘New Age Trojan Horse’ is sardonic, biting and genius, showing off some of the finest lyrical work on the project, which isn’t easy across a project so consistently clever.
Barrelling down into the final stretch, ‘Knotted’ and ‘Reinstall’ work best as a pair. Introspective, tender and searching ballads, they also happen to carry some of the heaviest lyrical punch across the albums duration. “Fur Elise” closes the album by gesturing backwards toward a beautiful, simple classical piano song that Teitelbaum learned in her youth. Blondshell's “Fur Elise” narrates the crosshairs of growing up and not knowing exactly how to, turning on a deliberately wonky central metaphor: walking down the aisle to “Fur Elise,” fully aware that no one would actually get married to it. The mismatch is the point. "You're trying to figure out what you want your life to look like, and what you want playing at your wedding, but you don't even know where to start,” Teitelbaum says. “You're picking the wrong song.
There cannot be any more denial, Blondshell feels tethered to the fabric of the 2020’s indie scene and to fail to recognise what she has spent three albums masterfully building up would be to deny her a rightful place in the pantheon of vital and indeed vibrant songwriters of her generation.
4/5
