BLONDSHELL

Violins

(Partisan)

Sabrina Teitelbaum has always had a knack for taking the ugly, complicated bits of being a person and putting them inside songs that make you want to turn the stereo up. ButViolins feels different. It’s a little like being invited into Sabrina’s  room while she spirals and figures things out in real time.

And there’s plenty to figure out.

Across her third album, Teitelbaum moves away from the romantic wreckage that coloured so much of her earlier work and starts pulling apart bigger questions: friendship, bodies, spirituality, violence, healing, beauty, and what it actually means to exist in a world that can be both gorgeous and completely fucked.

The guitars are sharper. There’s a little more bite in the bones of these songs, with flashes of post-punk angularity and ’90s guitar-pop sitting alongside the fuzz and melancholy that already feels unmistakably Blondshell. Violins has the kind of guitars that make you want to drive somewhere with no particular destination and probably make a few questionable decisions when you get there. It’s an inspiring album. 

“Heart Has To Work So Hard” is a perfect example. It has that great Blondshell trick of sounding catchy enough to sing along to before you realise the lyrics have quietly stabbed you in the ribs.

“Lucky” takes things somewhere softer, brighter and slightly dreamlike, while “Stone Fruit” has this loose, conversational quality that makes it feel less like a perfectly constructed song and more like you’ve accidentally wandered into the middle of someone’s thought process. Which is again the feel of the album as a whole.

That’s probably my favourite thing about Violins. There are no tidy little lessons here. No triumphant “I’ve healed and now everything is fine” ending. Healing is presented for what it usually is: boring, painful, occasionally beautiful work that you have to keep doing tomorrow.

And then there’s “Fur Elise”, closing the record in a completely different emotional register. It feels expansive and strangely hopeful, like opening the curtains after spending too long in a dark room. Not because everything has suddenly been fixed, but because maybe you’ve remembered there’s a world outside and it’s calling for you. I feel like that a lot lately. And I will be listening to this album a lot, I think.

The title Violins comes from that collision between violence and beauty, and it makes sense once you sit with the record. There’s tenderness here, but it isn’t soft. There’s anger, but it isn’t always explosive. There’s humour, discomfort, desire, grief and a growing sense that Teitelbaum is becoming less interested in explaining herself.

That feels like the real evolution. The first Blondshell record sounded like someone discovering exactly how loudly she could scream. Violins sounds like someone who has realised she doesn’t need to scream all the time. Sometimes she can just point at the wreckage, raise an eyebrow and write a really bloody good song about it. And honestly, that might be even more intoxicating.

Stream the whole Blondshell Violins album