BLONDSHELL - Violins

Sabrina Teitelbaum has made a name for herself in recent years with two pop albums dressed up in electric guitars, often sounding like a sweetened version of certain nineties alternative-rock, complete with grunge-tinged effects and minor chords, just to underline the melancholy of certain passages. Now on the threshold of turning thirty, a milestone the singer herself finds stimulating, Blondshell arrives at her third album, often considered the decisive one, through which she cements her standing among the most talented young girl-with-guitar artists of her generation.
The structure of most of the songs is often predictable, and this - it must be said - is the only flaw found in her work so far: they often start out slow and enveloping, before exploding on a wave of impetuous crescendos. The textbook case remains "Event Of A Fire", from the previous album "If You Asked For A Picture", released just a year and a half ago, which opened the doors to the trendiest festival stages for the American singer-songwriter, starting with her prestigious appearance across both weekends of Coachella 2026, this past April.

Blondshell's third album opens and closes with its three most impactful moments, not by chance chosen as the lead singles. The guitars are very much to the fore, and Sabrina's voice continues to bring to mind the never-forgotten Dolores O'Riordan. "Violins" and "Heart Has To Work So Hard" are two excellent ways to open a record with vibrant energy, with choruses charged with electricity, just as the evocative, intensely dramatic "Fur Elise" is the most moving ending imaginable.
In between, more electrically propulsive tracks ("Lucky", "Stone Fruit", "Two Fried") alternate with others that settle into a delicate autumnal mood ("Sea Legs", "New Shape", "Knotted"), close to the style of Phoebe Bridgers.

In her lyrics Blondshell levels often cutting invective at the people who have let her down, a lover, a friend, her peers, even the whole of humankind, or herself, an anger at times smoothed over by introspective moments of truce. Hers seems a search for authentic bonds, unfolding between rough guitars and refined piano. "New Age Trojan Horse" delivers one of the album's best grooves, while "Reinstall" turns out to be its most dramatic chapter: emotional highs and lows that represent the result of Blondshell's artistic evolution, focused - now more than ever - on the search for the real meaning of the word "happiness".

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03/10/2026