Violins: Blondshell gets louder and less literal

Violins is the heaviest Blondshell record and the least literal one. Sabrina Teitelbaum writes about violence, religion, and friendships that have gone wrong, but she has stopped handing over the explanation with the song. On the record, the guitars carry more of the argument.

Teitelbaum came to this through a false start. She put out pop singles as BAUM in the late 2010s, then rebooted as Blondshell with the single Olympus in June 2022. Her self-titled debut arrived in April 2023 on Partisan Records, and If You Asked for a Picture followed in 2025. In between she toured with Suki Waterhouse, Horsegirl, and Porridge Radio, played South by Southwest and Austin City Limits, and took a song to The Tonight Show. Violins, out now on Partisan, is her third album and it lands barely a year after the second.

Eleven tracks, and none of them eased in. Teitelbaum has said the record is heavy, that the writing has grown less literal, and that imagery has taken over from detail. Her aim, in her own words: "my main goal with this record was to have songs that hit hard. I wanted big lead lines." The title track opens on a crunching, buzzing guitar, a line about a battle song that sounds like spit on a stranger, and a promise nobody intends to keep.

"Heart Has To Work So Hard" is the motor. It rises and falls, the vocals stack and swarm, and the hook lands inside the racket rather than after it. "Lucky" changes the pace and turns the guitars hazy and pop-shaped. "Sea Legs" goes further out, synth-led and soft at the edges, with a Leonard Cohen reference worked into the lyric.

"Stone Fruit" shows how much noise the production can hold: tactile imagery, stacked harmonies, buzzsaw guitars, and the same chaos she found on the early single "Veronica Mars". "Two Fried" is the breather and the best joke here, a light, energetic riff around a metaphor about eggs that turns out to be about liking her own body. "New Age Trojan Horse" is the sharpest writing on the record, sardonic and unhurried.

Then "Knotted" and "Reinstall" pull the volume back, two tender, searching songs that put their heaviest lines where a chorus would normally sit.

This one is for anyone who liked the debut's plain-spoken wreckage and wants to hear what happens when the same writer gets louder and less willing to explain. It will sit easily next to a Courtney Barnett record, or any guitar album that keeps its sentences short. It also rewards a second play, which is when the one real problem shows up: "Knotted" and "Reinstall" are both good songs and both slow, and putting them back to back drains the middle of side two right when the closer needs the ground to be solid. One of them belongs earlier. That stall is the only thing to forgive on a record this tight.

It ends on "Fur Elise", built on the piano piece Teitelbaum learned as a kid, imagining herself walking down the aisle to it, the wrong song for the moment. That is the problem the album keeps circling: working out what you want your life to look like, what should be playing while it happens, and not knowing where to start. It goes quiet, and the quiet makes you lean in. This is a 4.5: the first Blondshell record where the sound and the writing are equally good. Teitelbaum wanted big lead lines. The last one on the record is played on a piano.

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