Blondshell

Early life

Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, who performs as Blondshell, was born in New York City and raised in Midtown Manhattan. Her father, Doug Teitelbaum, chairs NJOY, and her birth mother converted to Judaism; the family belonged to a Reform synagogue and observed Jewish holidays, and Teitelbaum had a bat mitzvah. Her father raised her largely on his own, as her birth mother was not around during her childhood and passed away in January 2018. Her maternal grandfather is hedge fund manager Randall Smith.

She has an older sister, a twin brother, and two step-siblings from her father’s second marriage. As a child, she watched Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sarah Silverman’s stand-up. She started writing songs and taking singing lessons at age seven, performing in elementary school. Her father introduced her to classic rock and took her to her first concerts: the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden in 2005 and a Cher show in Las Vegas.

Seeing Jersey Boys on Broadway left a strong impression, as did Adele’s 19 and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, which she learned to play on piano. In high school at the Dalton School, she played in several bands—including one with classmate Blu DeTiger—performed at talent shows, and used a fake ID to get into Lower East Side clubs for shows and open mics. She called her high school experience “kind of catty, intense” and said music was her hideaway.

At 18, she moved to Los Angeles in 2015 to study songwriting in USC Thornton’s Pop Music Program, but dropped out after two years to pursue music. Her coursework covered classical, jazz harmony, Motown, and music theory.

Career

Teitelbaum first shared music on SoundCloud in 2014. After leaving USC Thornton, she launched her career as BAUM. In 2017, she put out three singles: "First," "Hot Water," and "Effortless," with Wonderland premiering the last one. To mark "Hot Water," she played a show at Rockwood Music Hall in New York that August.

The following February, she released "This Body," a song about body positivity that Billboard and Nylon premiered, and Target used it for their "No Body Like Mine" campaign. She initially hinted at a debut album called First for spring 2018, but instead dropped the EP Ungodly on March 16, 2018, produced by The Orphanage, proteges of Oak Felder who had co-produced Demi Lovato's "Sorry Not Sorry." That same month, she played South by Southwest for the first time and landed on the festival's official 2018 playlist.

A planned April show at Boston's Middle East nightclub with singer Dagny was called off due to bronchitis. Her songs also appeared on Spotify's "Out Now" and "Young & Free" playlists. For much of the next year, she went quiet, dealing with personal struggles: her mother's death, a breakup, and parting ways with her manager. She came back in May 2019 with the single "Fuckboy," followed by "Bad Kid" in August, which had a music video shot in Iceland.

"Fuckboy" was meant to lead a second EP called Curve, set for that fall, and a video was made for a planned third single, "Girls Who Like You," but neither release happened. On December 3, 2019, she put out a cover of Mac Miller's "Dunno." Teitelbaum had never felt right about her pop sound as BAUM, later saying she never loved the name or felt fully confident in the music. In early 2020, she told producer Yves Rothman, who had been working on Curve with her, that she wanted to scrap the EP.

Blondshell (2020–2023)

Rothman asked to hear other material she had, and after listening to her acoustic demo of "Olympus," he pushed her to write more in that style. She started writing what became her first Blondshell album while isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic. She and her sister came up with the name Blondshell over dinner.

Artistry

Before adopting the Blondshell moniker, Sabrina Teitelbaum performed as BAUM, where her music was rooted in pop. Critics labeled her sound with a long list of subgenre tags, including alternative pop, dark pop, indie pop, electropop, synth-pop, dance-pop, soul-pop, and chill pop. She herself called it "natural grunge." Her work was likened to Haim, Carly Rae Jepsen, Muna, Lana Del Rey, Adele, Lady Gaga, Lorde, and Tei Shi. The debut BAUM single "First" incorporated jazz elements, while "Fuckboy" was called "Halsey-ish," and its music video took visual cues from Haim, Maggie Rogers, and the TV series Euphoria.

As Blondshell, Teitelbaum shifts her influences toward alternative rock, indie rock, indie pop, grunge, Britpop, and folk. This new direction invites comparisons to 1990s alternative acts such as Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Hole, Belly, Throwing Muses, Veruca Salt, and The Cranberries, as well as contemporary singer-songwriters like Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, Olivia Rodrigo, Japanese Breakfast, Boygenius, and Courtney Barnett.

The non-album single "Cartoon Earthquake" was described by Technique as sounding like "if Katy Kirby sang a slower, melancholy-tinged version of 'I Won't Back Down' by Tom Petty." In Paste, Matt Mitchell noted that her debut album features no two songs that sound alike, but it avoids feeling like a patchwork of subgenres. Instead, he wrote, it is Blondshell experimenting with her own takes on sonic textures perfected by artists she became obsessed with during the pandemic, including Hole, Nirvana, and Patti Smith.

He characterized the result as indie pop fused with grunge that deliberately resists being lost among other 1990s alternative imitations.

Mitchell also observed that Teitelbaum sings with the training of a classical vocalist, but layers on the swagger of Courtney Love and the pop appeal of Avril Lavigne. Other descriptions of her voice note a "cool Gen Z deadpan" that can rise into a "wistful falsetto," a "worn-out, pessimistic tone," and a range that moves between a raspy chest voice and a sheer falsetto. Willamette Week compared her stage presence to "a stoned high schooler dancing alone to their dad’s vinyl record collection," and highlighted the contrast between her gentle yet raw vocal timbre and her uninhibited movements across the stage.

Personal life

Teitelbaum shares a home in Eastside Los Angeles with her boyfriend and a German Shepherd named Chinchilla. She switched from a pescetarian diet to veganism in 2020. A casual interest in medicine helped shape the lyrics for "Sepsis," where the medical condition becomes a metaphor for a relationship. She identifies as bisexual and queer, having first come out during high school.

That experience led to the BAUM song "Hot Water" and a 2017 HuffPost piece. During her time with BAUM, she frequently talked about biphobia and bisexual erasure. She has expressed mixed feelings about being called a queer artist, telling the Los Angeles Times that while queer listeners need to see themselves reflected in joyful or difficult songs about sexuality, every artist is more than just their orientation. In a 2019 interview with The Line of Best Fit, she described herself as somewhere on a spectrum of masculinity and femininity, noting that while she identifies as a woman, she carries a lot of masculine energy that can confuse romantic interests when she fluctuates.

She echoed this in a 2023 Crack magazine interview, saying the gender binary is hard for her because her sense of gender shifts daily, and that exploring these feelings influenced her debut album. She struggled with drugs and alcohol before getting sober at the end of 2019, a process that shaped the first Blondshell album. She has also been open about social and stage anxiety. As a child, she had obsessive-compulsive disorder treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, and in high school she started taking Adderall to study and manage weight gain.

She dealt with anorexia and an eating disorder from age ten, eventually recovering in college through therapy and supportive friends. That experience, along with a catcalling incident at USC in 2016, inspired the BAUM song "This Body." She has publicly supported the Time's Up and MeToo movements.