Dominic ‘Yungblud’ Harrison is 10 minutes late for our interview. “So sorry,” he says apologetically when he does flip up. He’s simply had a boxing session, and remains to be sporting the gear he sparred in. He took up boxing a yr in the past and does it each morning.
“God, man, I’m actually fucking obsessive about it,” he says in his proudly undiluted Doncaster drawl. “I’ve acquired all this vitality, and typically after I don’t use all of it, it turns into nervousness and shit. If I do it each morning, 30 per cent of that nervousness goes away and I’m much more clear.”
He speaks like this on a regular basis: a verbal rally automobile driver opening the throttle and flooring the accelerator, swerving this manner and that, nearly flying off the street, however at all times attending to his supposed vacation spot in some way. “I’ve acquired one million ideas going by way of my head, I’m insecure about ten various things a minute, my ADHD’s like, bing-bing-bing-bing-bing, I’m at all times enthusiastic about the subsequent factor,” he says, not inaccurately.
Immediately, all that enthusiasm is concentrated on his upcoming fourth album, Idols Pt 1. It represents the sharpest of left turns for the 28 yr outdated. The place earlier albums had taken a grab-it-all strategy, mixing pop, punk, hip hop and the rest his magpie thoughts alighted on, this can be a rock album to its marrow, and an outrageous one at that.
The primary single and opening observe, Howdy Heaven, Howdy, is a powerful nine-minute blow-out that channels the spirit of Bowie, U2, The Who and Queen. The remainder of the album is just barely much less bold. There are guitar solos and real-life orchestras, Britpop influences and swirling psychedelia, huge billowing ballads and gutter stage rockers, to not point out a broad if vague idea and a second half to observe subsequent yr. Within the context of his earlier albums, it’s the maddest factor Harrison has made. Within the context of Harrison himself, it makes excellent sense.
“It’s essentially the most bold I’ve ever been,” he says. “I went there with this: ‘I’m going to place every part I’ve acquired into this shot at doing one thing extraordinary.’ Let’s make a double album in two components that references Darkish Aspect Of The Moon or Rumours or A Night time At The Opera, and has an concept and a through-line and a narrative, versus ‘what number of songs we are able to get within the fucking High 10.’ As a result of why the fuck not? Let me at the least strive. Let me have a shot on the huge boys’ desk.”
There’s a lot to unpack about Idols, and Harrison is right here to unpack it. For the subsequent hour he’ll discuss exhilaratingly and entertainingly about every part from musicians that impressed it (“Freddie” as in Mercury, “Stevie” as in Nicks, “David” as in Bowie and Gilmour, all endearingly delivered in first title phrases) to watching his unlikely pal and mentor Ozzy Osbourne slicing a salami sandwich with a machete knife whereas giving him careers recommendation. “He stated, ‘You get this chance as a result of you aren’t afraid to say the issues different folks will likely be. So if you cease fucking doing that, you ain’t a rock star any extra.’”
However on the coronary heart of all of it is Harrison himself: a 28-year-old who has constructed not only a profitable profession however a complete neighborhood centred on inclusivity and tolerance and compassion and fury on the injustice of the world. The success of final yr’s inaugural Bludfest – the competition he’d created, put cash into, curated and headlined – rubber-stamped him as a misfit Pied Piper for the 2020s.
However the Yungblud of Idols is a unique beast. It sees him deconstructing the thought of fame and what it means to be adored, questioning who he’s and what he’s doing. That is Dominic Harrison altering, shifting forwards and taking a shot at greatness.
Between ending the marketing campaign for his third album, 2022’s Yungblud, and beginning Idols, Dominic Harrison discovered himself in a darkish place.
His profession had been one steady upswing since he launched his debut album, twenty first Century Legal responsibility, in 2018. 2020’s Bizarre! and follow-up Yungblud each reached No.1 within the UK. There have been high-profile collabs with everybody from Denzel Curry to his onetime accomplice Halsey. He was the golden boy with mad eyes, wild hair and his mouth completely open along with his tongue protruding.
Besides the Yungblud of all of it was sporting off. He was getting uninterested in different folks’s expectations of him. “The concept of being this loud, brash staple of youth was actually laborious to dwell as much as all of the fucking time: ‘Do the face! Be loud!’” he says. “It was simply suffocating me. I’d had 4 years of individuals both questioning whether or not I used to be actual or genuine, or loving me to the purpose of suffocation. You stroll in a pub and also you don’t know if folks fucking love you or hate you. I wanted to take a second and consider what I wished to do.”
He started consuming closely and bingeing on meals to take care of it. The way in which he explains it, his way of life was partly an try to reclaim his personal life. “I used to be borderline having an consuming dysfunction: ‘If I’m gonna eat this and do this, at the least I can management it.’”
He was approaching 27 on the time, a legendary quantity in music for apparent causes. It’s one thing he wasn’t unaware of. “I believe the 27 Membership is a load of bollocks, but it surely’s behind your thoughts,” he says. “Folks have been apprehensive about me. I used to be not nicely.”
It didn’t assist that he hadn’t actually wished to make the Yungblud album, both. “After Bizarre!, I went, ‘Cool, I’ve been on this stunning journey, now the evil eye of the mainstream is taking a look at us, let’s make one thing fucking psychological, let’s actually create an journey.’ I used to be at a turning level.”
Harrison grew up loving the music his guitar shop-owner dad listened to: Bowie, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd. He wished to make an album that would stand alongside these – not a interval piece, he says, however a dwelling, respiration trendy model.
He started writing songs that will ultimately find yourself on Idols: the psychedelic Britpop of Lovesick Lullaby, phones-in-the-air anthem to physique positivity Zombie, the self-deconstructing Idols. He performed them for his American label, anticipating them to be as excited as he was.
“And they didn’t get it,” he says. “‘Time modifications? Fucking harmonies? What?! We’ve simply had a #1 album.’ So I used to be dissuaded from doing it.”
As a substitute, he discovered himself in London and LA, working with different songwriters on Yungblud, an album whose arena-pop ambitions have been tattooed throughout it. Commercially it was a hit. Yungblud turned his second No.1 and breached the Billboard High 50. Artistically? Much less so.
“I used to be repeating myself within the title of listening to different folks,” he says. “I’d actually misplaced who I used to be.”
He wouldn’t make the identical mistake subsequent time. After he’d accomplished with Yungblud, he took management of his consuming and his consuming, started boxing coaching and picked up the place he’d left off a few years earlier with Idols.
This reset wasn’t simply psychological, it was geographical. He recorded Idols at a transformed Tetley brewery in Leeds, 30 miles from the place he grew up in Doncaster. He says the outdated foreman’s home the place he labored on the album was haunted by the spirits of two males who had died there. “I just like the ghosts,” he insists. “I discuss to the ghosts. It was, like, ‘This fucking feels proper.’”
There was greater than paranormal exercise behind the choice to work in Leeds. It was an opportunity to reconnect with the individual he was in peril of shedding.
“I wanted to be within the north,” he says. “Timothy Taylor’s ale and my finest mates and the scent you get in northern England when the rain bounces off the gravel as a result of the roads haven’t been tarmacked correctly for years. I wanted all that simply to be, like: ‘Who the fuck are you, man, as a human?’, with out anyone else’s opinion, good or dangerous.”
This type of self-searching is everywhere in the new album. The rationale he referred to as it Idols, he says, is as a result of he determined to cease trying to different folks for solutions. He’s not embracing his personal idols, he’s pushing them away. And he needs different folks to do the identical with theirs, as much as and together with Yungblud himself.
“It’s about self-reclamation,” he says. ”It’s an idea album about relinquishing your idols and discovering the solutions to your personal life. You take a look at {a photograph} on a wall, you need to be that {photograph}. In my case, you find yourself as that {photograph}. However then you definately realise the {photograph} by no means had any solutions, it’s me who had the solutions on a regular basis.”
A video that went viral on social media illustrates this concept higher than Harrison can. It was filmed in Amsterdam in March 2025, simply a few weeks earlier than we converse, and options an impromptu interplay with a fan.
“You saved my life,” the fan tells him, teary with emotion.
“No you saved your personal life, I didn’t save your life,” Harrison replies. “Possibly the music was the soundtrack, however you saved your personal life OK?” He provides her a hug. “I really like you. Don’t be unhappy, be pleased.”
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“And I acquired again to the lodge and I actually digested that,” he says. “Like, that is the basic factor that I need to say on this album. The solutions are inside us all. While you relinquish the glorification of one thing, all of it comes all the way down to what’s inside you.”
Self-awareness is the lyrical engine that drives Idols. That is Yungblud breaking down not simply what it means to be well-known, however what it means to be Yungblud. The selection to ship it as a modern-day rock idea album at a time when rock’s cultural energy is diminished makes is a bold-verging-on-insane one. Bizarre!: The Sequel it isn’t.
“The factor about rock is that it’s acquired such a fucking turned-up nostril,” he says, with the eagerness of somebody who is aware of the topic nicely sufficient to attract consideration to its flaws. “Fuck the feedback sections, fuck the folks that can hate on it. I need to encourage younger youngsters in bands. Make it, say it, do it, fucking dwell it. Bollocks, it doesn’t matter.”
That type of discuss makes for excellent copy however there’s one other dimension to this. Considered from one angle, Harrison has had it straightforward up to now. Sure, his music and pure ebullience has attracted loads of very vocal detractors, which in flip hasn’t accomplished a lot for his psychological well being. However he’s constructed the type of devoted fanbase that hardly ever occurs nowadays.
There’s a hazard that Idols may baffle and even alienate a few of these followers. A part of the pull of Yungblud is that he’s the relatable outsider, the wild man doing the loopy issues that most individuals by no means get an opportunity to do. Releasing an album that’s so clearly his shot at turning into one of many all-time greats is without doubt one of the least outsidery issues he may do.
“No, as a result of I’m not making an attempt to be like them,” he counters, which means his personal heroes. “I’m doing what I need, with my finest pals, going ‘Fuck the individuals who love me, fuck the individuals who hate me, fuck the journalists, fuck everybody!’”
What if folks don’t get it?
He laughs. “Fuck it! You’re all idiots! I find it irresistible!”
No, critically. What if it falls flat on its arse?
“No, that’s my level. If I’ve to depart everybody behind, can I truthfully stand behind this album and say, ‘Yep, that is my assertion, that is my fact’? And I can. I imagine that if it falls flat on its arse proper now, folks will get the place I used to be at sometime.”
Whether or not Harrison could be as bullish if Idols doesn’t dwell as much as expectations is hypothetical at this stage, although in his defence he in all probability could be. However it might even be vastly unfair if that occurs. Idols deserves an viewers that appreciates its ambition. This isn’t an album that’s bowing earlier than the greats that Harrison worships. It’s an album that desires to elbow its manner amongst them and say, ‘Take heed to this.”
He’s definitely assured sufficient in it to be releasing a second half, Idols Pt 2, subsequent yr. “I see Idols Pt 1 as the sunshine and Idols Pt 2 because the darkness,” he says. “I’d say Idols Pt 2 is somewhat heavier musically.”
He toyed with the thought of releasing the entire thing as an old-school double album, however figured that could be overwhelming. “I need to extend the journey, versus being: ‘Right here it’s, all now! Fucking stimulate yourselves after which forgot about it, like each different track on the radio!’”
Idols is launched on June 20, the day earlier than the second Bludfest at Milton Keynes Bowl. He plans to play a great chunk of the brand new album on the competition, however he’ll be airing it in full on his personal tour later within the yr.
“My vibe is I’m going to play the album from begin to end with an orchestra, have an interval, then come on and play some hits,” he says of the latter. “It’s gonna be an journey if you see it dwell. One minute you‘re going psychological, one minute you’re crying, one minute you’re turning to your mate and telling them you’re keen on them, one minute you’re moshing. I need it to be like a non secular expertise.”
He may keep it up like this for days, however the whirring wheel of color and noise that’s continuously spinning in his head must quickly take a again seat to the practicalities of being a musician with a brand new album on the horizon. There are conferences available, selections to be made. Grown-up stuff, mainly.
“I didn’t write this album as a result of I must develop up,” he says. “I wrote it as a result of I used to be altering, I am altering.
“I’m going to a unique place when it comes to my safety inside myself and my confidence. I wished to make an album for myself once more.”
Idols Pt 1 is out on June 20 by way of Locomotion/Island Information. Bludfest 2025 takes place June 21 on the Milton Keynes Bowl. Take a look at our unique Yungblud T-shirt that includes hand-drawn lyrics, solely on the Louder retailer.
