Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, better known as Blondshell, is an American indie rock musician based in Los Angeles, California. Following an early pop-leaning career under the name BAUM, Teitelbaum debuted Blondshell in June 2022 with the single "Olympus". She has toured with acts including Suki Waterhouse, Horsegirl, and Porridge Radio and has performed at South by Southwest, Austin City Limits Music Festival, and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Her self-titled debut album was released on April 7, 2023 via Partisan Records, receiving positive reviews.

Teitelbaum was born in New York City^[3][4] and grew up in Midtown Manhattan.^[5][6] Her father is Jewish while her birth mother converted to Judaism; the family attended a Reform synagogue and celebrated Jewish holidays, and Teitelbaum received a bat mitzvah.^[7][8][9] She was largely raised by her father, NJOY chairman Doug Teitelbaum,^[10][7][6] as her birth mother was not present during her childhood and died in January 2018.^[7][8] She has two biological siblings, an older sister and a twin brother, as well as two step-siblings from her father's second marriage.^[6] Growing up, she often watched the show Curb Your Enthusiasm and the stand-up comedy of Sarah Silverman.^[9]

Teitelbaum wrote songs and took singing lessons from the age of 7,^[4] and began performing in elementary school.^[11] Her father exposed her to classic rock^[5][6][7] and took her to her first concerts: The Rolling Stones's 2005 performance at Madison Square Garden on their A Bigger Bang Tour, and a Cher show in Las Vegas.^[3][6] Seeing Jersey Boys on Broadway was also a formative musical experience for her, as were Adele's 19 and Amy Winehouse's Back to Black albums, which she learned to play on piano.^[7] In high school, she performed her songs at school talent shows,^[7] was in several bands (including one with classmate Blu DeTiger), and attended shows and open mics at Lower East Side clubs with the help of a fake ID.^[5]

Teitelbaum attended Dalton School for high school;^[6][7] she has described her high school experience as "kind of catty, intense"^[12] and said that "music was my hideaway" during that time.^[5] After graduating, the 18-year-old Teitelbaum moved to Los Angeles in 2015.^[5][13] There, she attended the USC Thornton School of Music and majored in songwriting with the school's Pop Music Program, before dropping out after two years to pursue music.^{[5][6][7][13]} Her studies at USC Thornton included classical, jazz harmony, Motown, and music theory.^[14][15]

During her time as BAUM, Teitelbaum was primarily a pop artist, variously described as alternative pop,^{[11][24][25][8][41]} dark pop,^{[57][4][8][58]} indie pop,^[17][59] electropop,^[13][11][7] synth-pop,^[17][13] dance-pop,^[26] soul-pop,^[5][60] and chill pop.^[6] This sound, which Teitelbaum initially labelled "natural grunge",^[18] was compared to artists like Haim,^{[18][26][22][25]} Carly Rae Jepsen,^[22][58] Muna,^[18][58][26] Lana Del Rey, Adele,^[61] Lady Gaga, Lorde,^[12] and Tei Shi.^[26] Debut single "First" was infused with elements of jazz,^[17] while "Fuckboy" was described as "Halsey-ish",^[7] with a music video visually evoking Haim, Maggie Rogers, and the drama series Euphoria.^[25]

With Blondshell, Teitelbaum draws from alternative rock,^{[5][6][62][57]} indie rock,^{[57][62][63][41]} indie pop,^[59][14] grunge,^{[5][57][41][64][65][14]} Britpop,^[66][67] and folk.^[14] This style has drawn comparisons to '90s alternative artists like Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Hole, Belly, Throwing Muses, Veruca Salt, and The Cranberries,^{[68][13][7][69]} as well as modern singer-songwriters like Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, Olivia Rodrigo, Japanese Breakfast, Boygenius, and Courtney Barnett.^{[7][36][9][70][71][47][72][73]} Technique compared the non-album single "Cartoon Earthquake" to "if Katy Kirby sang a slower, melancholy-tinged version of “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty."^[71] Matt Mitchell of Paste Magazine wrote of her debut album, "No two songs sound alike, yet Blondshell is not a collage of subgenres. Instead, it’s Blondshell tinkering with her own renditions of sonic palettes previously mastered by the artists she got really stoked on during the pandemic, like Hole, Nirvana and Patti Smith. It’s indie pop fused with grunge, but it also, thoroughly, rebuffs getting lost among other ’90s alternative imitations."^[14]

Regarding her singing voice, Mitchell wrote that Teitelbaum "sings like a classically trained vocalist while injecting her charisma with the bravado of Courtney Love and the pop likability of Avril Lavigne."^[14] Her voice has been described as "a cool Gen Z deadpan that occasionally spirals up to a wistful falsetto",^[7] having "a worn-out, pessimistic tone",^[74] and varying between "a raspy chest voice and a sheer falsetto at times".^[49] Willamette Week compared her stage presence to "a stoned high schooler dancing alone to their dad’s vinyl record collection" and noted that she sang with "a gentle yet raw timbre boldly contrasted against her liberated movements across the stage".^[75]

Teitelbaum lives in the Eastside Los Angeles area with her boyfriend and a pet German Shepherd named Chinchilla.^[7][6] Formerly pescetarian, she has been fully vegan since 2020.^[6] Her amateur interest in the field of medicine partially inspired the lyrics to "Sepsis", which uses the titular condition as a relationship metaphor.^[7]

Teitelbaum is bisexual^[7][8][11] and self-identifies as queer.^[4][7][5] She first came out in high school,^[77][8] an experience which inspired the BAUM song "Hot Water"^[8][11] and which she later wrote about for HuffPost in 2017.^[77] In interviews as BAUM, she often discussed issues such as biphobia and bisexual erasure.^[11][8] She has voiced mixed feelings on being labelled a queer artist, telling the Los Angeles Times that "on one hand, people need to be able to go on the internet: ‘OK, I’m queer and I want to see other people who are openly singing with joy about their sexuality or about the difficulties of it.’ [...] But at the same time, every artist is so much more than their sexuality."^[7]

Discussing an unreleased single with The Line of Best Fit in 2019, Teitelbaum noted that she was "somewhere on a spectrum in terms of masculinity and femininity. I do identify as a woman, for sure, but there’s a lot of masculine energy that I have. That gets in the way sometimes, when I’m interested in someone. I’ll randomly be more masculine one day, and they’re like, ‘what the fuck?!’"^[17] She expressed similar sentiments in a 2023 interview with Crack magazine, saying that "The binary is hard for me, because how I feel about my gender changes a lot day to day," and that exploring her shifting feelings of gender had influenced the writing of her debut album.^[78]

Teitelbaum struggled with drugs and alcohol before deciding to pursue sobriety at the end of 2019; her sobriety process influenced the first Blondshell album.^[6] She has also spoken of her struggles with anxiety, particularly social and stage anxiety.^[77][49][11] She had obsessive–compulsive disorder as a child that was treated with cognitive behavioral therapy,^[11] and she began taking Adderall in high school to help her study for exams and deal with weight gain.^[77] She dealt with anorexia and an eating disorder from the age of ten, ultimately combatting it in college with the help of therapy and a supportive friend group.^[77][79][11] This, as well as an incident of catcalling she experienced at USC in 2016, inspired the BAUM song "This Body".^[11][79][4] She has voiced support for the Time's Up and MeToo movements.^[12]

On the subject of Judaism, Teitelbaum said in 2019, "I really care about Judaism and I really identify with it. [...] I don’t know if I personally believe in God. I’ve talked about it with my grandparents who are really religious and they say it doesn’t really matter as much. I perceive Judaism as a more open-minded religion where you don’t really have to follow all of the rules. It’s mostly about the community, traditions, and family."^[8]