Blondshell has shared a grunge-tinged new single, ‘What’s Fair’.
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The new track follows the release of her cover of Talking Heads‘ ‘Thank You For Sending Me An Angel’, recorded as part of A24’s ‘Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads’ compilation album, and her collaboration with Bully on ‘Docket’.
With her close-to-completed second album on the horizon, Blondshell – real name Sabrina Teitelbaum – has shared a complex track inspired by the “inherently complicated” mother-daughter dynamic.
On it, she laments: “You’d want me to be famous/ So you could live by proxy/ You always had a reason to comment on my body/ You’re not a perfect person/ Something’s always wrong / But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mum.”
Teitelbaum said of the song: “Maybe it’s because of my own relationship, which was grounded in a lot of trauma and loss, but I think it’s always confusing.
“What are you allowed to expect, what is normal, what behaviour from a parent is OK or not OK? And to what extent does ‘normal’ even matter when your experience is all you have. I was just trying to sift through the past when I wrote this song and I mostly had a lot of questions.”
Last year, NME spoke to Blondshell about her self-titled debut album for our Cover series, where she discussed mining her relationships to write unflinching personal songs – “because maybe that will make me feel better”.
On ‘Sober Together, for instance, she charts helping a friend through sobriety while they struggle with relapsing.
“I was so mad at this person, and I went to write a ‘fuck you’ song to get that out,” she said in the interview. “While I was writing, I was like, ‘Fuck you, but also, I love you, and I wouldn’t be mad if I didn’t love you’.
“It helped me get in touch with that part of my feelings for somebody else. I was really grateful for it – it’s much more comfortable to feel like ‘but I still love you’ than it is to feel like ‘you’re shitty for doing this’.”