In the past few years, 25-year-old Sabrina Teitelbaum has transformed into a songwriter without fear. The loud-quiet excavations that comprise her hook-filled debut as Blondshell don’t only stare traumas in the eye—they tear them at the root and shake them, bringing precise detail to colossal feelings. They’re clear-eyed statements of and about digging your way toward confidence, self-possession, and relief.

Sabrina shed her previous, pop-leaning project, Baum, and the process emboldened her. Subtracting self-consciousness became a catalyst for the lucid songs of Blondshell, on which her experiences all coalesce to form her truest expressions of self yet. “It was me, as a person, in my songs,” she says. When she showed a few to producer Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Girlpool, Porches), he encouraged her to write an album, joining a chorus of friends saying, “This is you.”