Get the latest gossip

Blondshell on Baring Her Soul for Her New Album: ‘99% of It Is Autobiographical’

Her second full-length, 'If You Asked for a Picture' is a personal alt-rock catharsis with crunchy, grungy guitars and beautiful backing vocals.

Take her latest single, “23’s a Baby,” which angrily questions the choices of a young mother — hints in the lyrics suggest its her own, who died in 2018 — but the honeyed aah-aah-aah s that Blondshell, 28, adds throughout the song offset the rancor in a way that creates a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance: it’s a tragedy that you want to sing at the top of your lungs. Another grunge-flavored earworm, “What’s Fair,” appears to take more direct aim at a mother, and there are songs about ambivalent relationships, body image and identity, but If You Asked for a Picture — which, like her self-titled first album was produced by Yves Rothman — is beautiful, not bereft, an alt-rock catharsis with nods to the ’80s and ’90s. Last spring saw her release “Docket,” a standalone banger with Bully(Alicia Bognanno) that has racked up 4.3 million plays on Spotify, and a hypnotic cover of Talking Heads ‘ “Thank You for Sending Me An Angel,” which was among the standout cuts on last year’s Stop Making Sense tribute album.

Get the Android app