25 September 2026 – Blondshell Turns Up the Guitars and Turns Inward on Violins

Sabrina Teitelbaum's Blondshell reaches album number three with Violins, an eleven-track collection released through Partisan that pushes her sharp-edged alternative rock into bigger and occasionally stranger territory. Produced again with Yves Rothman, the record follows 2025's If You Asked For A Picture but shifts the emotional focus away from disastrous romance toward friendship, religion, physical identity, recovery and the much less cinematic business of learning how to live with yourself.

There are still enough distorted guitars here to frighten anyone arriving with an acoustic café playlist, but Teitelbaum has widened the musical references considerably. The record pulls from the melodic guitar craft of Teenage Fanclub and The Go-Betweens while occasionally wandering into more unexpected territory. Songs such as "Heart Has To Work So Hard," "Lucky," "Stone Fruit," "New Age Trojan Horse" and closing track "Fur Elise" suggest an artist increasingly comfortable leaving rough edges exposed.

The title track sets the tone particularly well: melodically inviting, emotionally unsettled and built around guitars that sound as though they have been instructed to remain polite but are quietly refusing. Blondshell's breakthrough arrived on the strength of blunt songwriting and enormous hooks. Violins doesn't abandon that formula so much as give it a larger house and several rooms nobody has fully explored yet.