Blondshell has shared her tender new single ‘Two Times’ from her forthcoming album ‘If You Asked For A Picture’.
The stripped-back, acoustic-driven track sees Blondshell – real name Sabrina Teitelbaum – sing: “How bad does it have to hurt to count / Does it have to hurt at all / I’ll come back if you put me down two times,” questioning if a healthy relationship has less value if there’s no conflict within in.
Directed by Hannah Bon, ‘Two Times’s accompanying lyric video sees the ‘Salad’ singer singing the track in a studio while posing for photos.
Speaking about the song in a press release, Blondshell said: “I feel like I’m always seeing movies and shows where conflict is the only way love is expressed. It’s a lot of stories where someone has to work really hard to get somebody else to love them, and that’s what seems to make the relationship valuable.
“This song was basically like, what if it’s just solid? What if it’s just good and the relationship’s healthy? Does that mean it is less valuable? I think that’s a painful question because it’s essentially asking how capable you are of being in a decent relationship. But it’s also a love song in that way.”
‘Two Times’ marks the third single to be released from her upcoming second album ‘If You Asked For A Picture’. It follows ‘T&A‘ and lead single ‘What’s Fair‘. The LP is set for release on May 2 via Partisan and is available for pre-order here.
‘If You Asked For A Picture’ sees the former NME Cover star returning to the studio with producer Yves Rothman. The LP title is borrowed from a line in the 1986 poem Dogfish by Mary Oliver. “There’s a part of the poem that says: ‘I don’t need to tell you everything I’ve been through. It’s just another story of somebody trying to survive,’” Teitelbaum has explained.
“Something I love about songs is that you’re showing a snapshot of a person or a relationship, and showing a glimpse into a story can be just as important as trying to capture the entire thing. Sometimes it’s even truer to the entire picture than if you tried to write everything down.”
Blondshell’s 2023 self-titled debut album received five stars from NME, who noted: “‘Blondshell’, then, is a complete triumph in several ways. Rarely do emerging artists receive the benefit of the doubt to change tack, recalibrate their sound and allow their lived experiences to develop and find their way into the music.
“Too often is that creator pigeonholed or, worse, written off – and such could have been the case for Teitelbaum. Instead, we have one of the alternative rock albums of the year, and one to treasure tightly for quite some time.”
Since then, she has released the single ‘Docket’ alongside Bully, which NME recently named as one of the best songs of 2024.
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’.”
