Blondshell – Scaring Strangers Tour
Prewn
Tue, November 3, 2026
Doors: 7:00 pm
9:30 club
Washington, DC
$1 from every ticket sold will go to The Ally Coalition’s work to support homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth.
Tickets are non-transferable until 72 hours prior to the show time. Any tickets suspected of being purchased for the sole purpose of reselling can be cancelled at the discretion of 9:30 Club / Ticketmaster, and buyers may be denied future ticket purchases for I.M.P. shows. Opening acts, door times, and set times are always subject to change.
Blondshell
On her third album as Blondshell, Sabrina Teitelbaum is digging in. After introducing herself as a vital new voice in rock on 2023’s Blondshell and 2025’s If You Asked for a Picture — filled with loud-quiet guitars and whipsmart songwriting that earned her global acclaim (“an alt-rock supernova.” – NY Times) — her third record, Violins, goes deeper. Teitelbaum now has the freedom to say exactly what she wants, how she wants. “I felt like I didn’t need to overexplain anything, like I can trust the people listening more,” Teitelbaum says. “It feels like every time I make a record, I get closer to making the thing that I really want to make.”
With its evocations of grandeur, drama, tragedy, and skill, Violins is an appropriate title for an album that spends its 11 tracks asking how we balance the world’s violence with its beauty. Teitelbaum’s songs are satisfyingly-structured as ever, with virtuoso hooks, swelling guitars, and telling lyrical nods to Leonard Cohen and Pavement. Pulling in fresh influences—Gang of Four and Teenage Fanclub’s singular tones, The Go-Betweens’ indie-pop precision, Sade’s calming synths—Violins carries you like a wave.
“This record’s heavy in a way,” Teitelbaum says, though her songwriting breathes anew. “It’s gotten a little bit less literal,” she says. “There’s more imagery. But my main goal with this record was to have songs that hit hard. I wanted big lead lines.” Three albums on, Teitelbaum’s working relationship with producer Yves Rothman has fully locked in—fleshing out the demos of songs Teitelbaum wrote on her own, then recording live with the band. “I felt like I wasn’t walking in the dark anymore,” Teitelbaum said of her increasing studio fluency. “I spend more time with Yves than almost anybody—we just have such an efficient working relationship.”
Previous Blondshell albums used romantic relationships as prisms to confront power, addiction, and body image, augmented with dry wit and nonchalant humor and confident scream-along choruses. On Violins, Teitelbaum explores these subjects without “the veil of bad romantic relationships,” she says. With more maturity, Violins addresses themes of violence, religion, and troubled friendships, taking creative lyrical liberties without sacrificing catharsis.
The daydream “Lucky” captures a dually solemn and buoyant energy. In a sunny, insomniac haze, Teitelbaum sarcastically pushes herself to express gratitude—“I got lucky, I feel beautiful and rested”—and names small pleasures (a Dublin cafe, lemon cake, her late mother’s necklace) even as they exist in her mind alongside images of a world on fire, and the weight of her own past. “She’s alive in my memory/She said that she had cancer/The truth is too complex for a kid,” Teitelbaum sings disarmingly in the second verse, glimpsing a deep-rooted rupture. The anthemic “Heart Has to Work So Hard” uses filmic exposition to describe a vexed-but-enduring friendship with a person who is struggling: “I think that it’s brave you choose to live,” Teitelbaum sings in her tactful, powerhouse alto. She approaches this subject more delicately on the biting acoustic song “New Shape”: “Banquets and pearls/Alone at concerts,” goes its opening line, contextualizing a relationship that finds her “Cutting up my soles/Walking on your eggshells.”
A mind-body tension flows through Violins. Teitelbaum writes about the body with her characteristically clever finesse on “Two Fried,” using a food metaphor involving eggs to revel in the feeling of simply liking her figure; on “New Age Trojan Horse,” she sings bluntly about periods, and the supposedly enlightened men who find them repulsive. “I care to stick to you like a clot,” she sings elsewhere, on “Stone Fruit,” another corporeal metaphor on a song that underscores how the body and mind are inseparable. Alongside these somatic inquiries, “Sea Legs” invokes the spiritual, exploring a personal relationship with a higher power not through organized religion but in the makeup of one’s earthly life. The song ultimately exalts the things and people she loves – the rain, harmony, her boyfriend – as realer deities.
The titular opening track is Violins’ North star. On the chorus, Teitelbaum puts music to an unassuming, everyday piece of dialogue — “It’s not overnight / It takes all my focusing / ‘It’s like watching paint’ / Wait, what’d you say?” — to capture how true healing from trauma takes a lifetime, but its resonance extends to anyone clawing their way towards growth that requires patience. Someone else might not understand (might even find the process as boring as watching paint dry), but the song is powered by the conviction of a person who knows that a good life is worth fighting for. As a 29-year-old staring down her Saturn Return, having gotten sober at 22, Teitelbaum knows this dynamic well—she spent her 20s feeling out-of-step from her peers (“We’re not like our friends at all,” she sing on “Reinstall”) but the wisdom of her decisions shines through in her eloquent writing.
At the end of Violins, “Fur Elise” closes the album by gesturing backwards toward a beautiful, simple classical piano song that Teitelbaum learned in her youth. Blondshell’s “Fur Elise” narrates the crosshairs of growing up and not knowing exactly how to, turning on a deliberately wonky central metaphor: walking down the aisle to “Fur Elise,” fully aware that no one would actually get married to it. The mismatch is the point. “You’re trying to figure out what you want your life to look like, and what you want playing at your wedding, but you don’t even know where to start,” Teitelbaum says. “You’re picking the wrong song.” Growth, self-possession, and the ongoing process of healing might seem to another person like “watching paint dry,” as she sings on Violins’ opener. But on “Fur Elise,” she puts forth a statement-of-self on her own terms: “Paint a wall with the things you want spoken out loud / And you get the choice to forget / And you render art / And the truth of it is separate” – a beguiling truth in itself, and a path forward.
Prewn
If Izzy Hagerup’s new album, System, feels immediately uncompromising it’s because it was never really designed for public consumption. Released under her Prewn moniker, Hagerup describes the album as a “private journal made public.” The arresting nine songs on System chronicle a deeply personal journey through the darkness of depression, but one that’s always undercut by moments of humor as well as selfishness and self-reflection–a push-and-pull that feels wholly distinctive.
Following on Prewn’s 2023’s debut album Through The Window–a collection of songs that Pitchfork hailed as a “striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness”–System finds her crawling even deeper into the dense folds of the night. Hagerup alone wrote and recorded the album, mostly in long stretches of bedroom sessions that found her working through the night until she began to hear birdsong. System reckons with a lot of the thoughts that tend to needle in during those small hours: guilt, shame, and self-absorption, as well as the societal pressures that sit at the root of such things.
“This new album comes from a much more self-centered place, the stagnant aftermath of intensity and emotion,” Hagerup says. “I think it came from a period of time that was more numb, hollow, and confused. More disassociated from heartfelt pain, more entrenched in a frustrating and aimless discomfort.”
That discomfort manifests itself in various ways throughout System. Each of the songs were a result of random inspiration, and find Hagerup working out of a desperation to record the pieces before the inspiration slipped through her fingers. “I feel in a constant state of writer’s block but I just put myself in the studio for hours and hours, sometimes in agony and desperation for any muse at all,” she explains. “Every once in a blue moon, a nugget gets thrown my way and I run as far as I can with it.”
The result is a wildly unique album that carries a sense of restlessness and unease in its bones, but also pulls the curtain back on what it takes and what it means to fully explore the self through song. “It seems that misery’s my best friend. I know it’ll come to me again and again…” Hagerup sings on the title track. Written while feeling acutely overwhelmed in a sea of people, the song touches upon everything from the mechanisms of the music industry, to cycles of depression, to the seemingly never-ending battle to escape the clutches of the patriarchy and capitalism. “When I wrote it I was supposed to be present and alive and gracious and happy. But somehow I couldn’t escape my own internal fears and depression that can follow me wherever I go,” she says.
Pulling together a number of the System’s key sentiments, “Dirty Dog” is like an intense fever dream–a song where the listener can never quite find their footing within the glitchy, malaise-like backdrop of its scorched instrumentation. Hagerup says. “I think a large continuity of the songs lies in the amateur quality of them. I’m a sucker for an imperfect recording.” Such sentiments bristle throughout “Dirty Dog,” shaping it into something prickly and unilluminated in a way that feels almost radical.
It’s a repeatedly explored dimension on System, and present again on “Only You,” which is a lighter but no-less labored undertaking. Where much of the album is shaped by the dense weave of atmosphere that ripples just below the surface, the song holds a torch to Hagerup’s voice and feels fascinating and oddly beautiful as it bends into shapes that you can never quite piece together or look away from. “This song is about the experience of falling in love for the first time,” she details. “Being enamored with the feeling and the person, while also being skeptical of the experience. What’s you, what’s me? What’s projection? What’s love vs. attachment? We never really get to the bottom of it in this one.”
From a bedroom floor in the middle of the night, through a tangle of cables and complex emotions, System grew into a document of disassociation. But it arrives undercut with a sense of lightness in comparison to Hagerup’s debut, and doesn’t surrender to the darkness. Instead, System dives into it with a keen and exploring eye, and through the gloom finds constant realizations of the wonder and appreciation of life. It’s a journey that holds a special kind of power, a brave struggle that never asks listeners to look away but instead to follow down the rabbit hole. That it leads to a place of fascination is testament to the sheer force these songs hold: songs of hurt and heart, fear and fun.
Venue Information:
9:30 Club
815 V Street N.W.
Washington, DC, 20001
930.com