Yungblud is ready to leave his idols behind

It’s 9am, and west London’s Portobello Road feels deserted. It’s quite the serene, slow Tuesday morning setting for NME to meet Dominic Harrison – aka Yungblud – as we take shelter from the light drizzle inside members club Electric House. Greeting us with a warm hug, Harrison is his usual endearing self from the get-go. After our conversation, he’s going boxing, something that has recently become a staple of his daily life. But over the course of the hour, Harrison is calm, considered and gentle, as he sips on a flat white.

These are not adjectives you would typically associate with Yungblud. When the Doncaster star broke through with 2018 debut ‘21st Century Liability’ and 2020’s ‘Weird!’, the appeal was his gobby mouth. His punk-rock attitude. The pink socks, skirts and chameleonic hair colour. No one could pin down his megamix of pop, rap, rock and punk.

He has his critics – accusations that Yungblud is all an act, a privately educated individual cosplaying as the voice of the outsiders. But on the flip side, legends like Brian May, Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl have also waxed lyrical about him. Amassing a devoted fanbase that religiously queue for his shows around the block from first thing in the morning, by the time ‘Weird!’ arrived, Yungblud had become a certified cult hero. When that second record and its follow-up – 2022’s self-titled effort – reached Number One in the UK, it confirmed his clear mainstream breakthrough.

“I self-titled my last album because I was trying to cling on to Yungblud – an idea I’d come up with when I was 18 – for dear life,” ponders Harrison, who is now 27. “When you come into the world as that, you are frozen as a snapshot in time. If you regurgitate the idea, that’s when people question your authenticity – has it always been an act? Has Yungblud been a character? Absolutely not. I just outgrew the first iteration of it.”

Yungblud’s fourth record ‘Idols’, a double album split across two parts, was borne out of the crossroads that Harrison found himself at. Is this Yungblud’s Ziggy Stardust moment? “People start asking you questions that you never thought you’d be insecure [about] – can you be Yungblud forever?” he admits. “When you become such a staple of youth, you either become a pastiche of yourself and play ’90s nights forever – you become adherent to an era – or you fucking reinvent.”

‘Idols’ is not just the rebirth of Yungblud, but a grappling with mortality and existentialism itself, stripping away Harrison’s hyper-specific lyrical approach in search of something more evergreen. It’s littered with Britpop and classic rock references, exemplified by nine-minute lead single ‘Hello, Heaven, Hello’, which nods to Led Zeppelin and The Verve. ‘Ghosts’ would feel at home on a U2 record. You might mistake the cinematic opening of ‘Zombie’ for Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’.

Yungblud has had plenty of praise for keeping rock alive. Now, he looks to its founding fathers to create something simultaneously classic and fresh in 2025. “You cannot steal directly [from the past], but you can steal how something makes you feel,” he reflects. “Music doesn’t last anymore, and it’s because we’re always in a rush. It’s having the bollocks to actually sit on an idea for more than 10 minutes.”

On ‘Idols’, Yungblud isn’t telling you how to feel or what to think. The key lies in its ambiguity, so fans can “colour in” the record with their own points of relatability, echoing the timeless language of Stevie Nicks, Elton John and Pink Floyd, Harrison explains. “The world doesn’t need another surface-level album,” he declares. “Even if this isn’t commercially successful, that’s the risk I wanted to take with it. If I don’t release a piece of art with this depth, I’ll be overlooked forever.”

Harrison wrote the cinematic ‘Ghosts’ while walking down the River Thames in the early hours of the morning, its enormous aura embodying that feeling of the sun coming up. “I wanted bedroom producers to be like, ‘Fuck,’” he teases, referring to the vastness of the track. Though he now lives in London, Harrison recorded ‘Idols’ in an old foreman’s house in the centre of Leeds, a free-standing pillar “in the middle of suburbia and gentrification”. The “safety” of Yorkshire, of home, came calling to Harrison, who felt his feet had left the ground.

“This album was all about self-reclamation – who the fuck is Dom?” he explains, intensely locking eyes with NME. “I’m trying to go home [more often], to see my mother, my sisters and fucking feel that energy of the north… it inevitably shows you who you are.”

Harrison was a childhood season ticket holder at Doncaster Rovers FC, and he was in attendance to witness their recent promotion to League One. “This album really made me comprehend mortality and existence. I would go back to the Rovers to feel my [late] grandad, and regurgitate a memory or a smell.” A future hometown show at the club’s Eco-Power stadium might be inevitable, he suggests.

To kick off the ‘Idols’ world tour, Yungblud will headline the second edition of his own festival, BludFest, this Saturday (June 21) at the legendary Milton Keynes Bowl. With tickets priced at £65 plus fees, the festival has been praised for its affordability, with Harrison recently telling the BBC how he “cannot play a festival where it’s £800 a ticket”, comparing his price to the likes of Reading & Leeds and British Summertime.

“When you become such a staple of youth, you either become a pastiche of yourself or you fucking reinvent”

“I don’t know if festival promoters take me seriously, and that’s why I wanted to start BludFest,” he explains. Nevertheless, Reading & Leeds boss Melvin Benn once hinted that Yungblud could be a future headliner. Would he still accept the call-up, if it were to come, given his stance on festival prices? He gazes into the open to mull over the question, perhaps something he hasn’t given too much thought to.

“Obviously, it would be a dream to [headline] Reading & Leeds. I would love to headline Glastonbury. I don’t think Download would have me, because I’m too much of a hybrid. But we’d have to talk about it… as long as I can fucking explain why, I’ll do it. If I had to go up £20 on my festival ticket, I’d explain why. I don’t mind putting my head above the trench and getting shot at first.”

Certain childhood dreams and goals that were perhaps once put on a pedestal exist differently for Yungblud in 2025 – and that is the crux of ‘Idols’. Harrison never met David Bowie or Freddie Mercury. Equally, the viral fan who told Harrison he saved her life had never met him. The answers lie within ourselves, and it’s time we recognise that these perceptions are a product of our own imagination and originality. Our idols are just the vessels. As Harrison explains this concept, it all clicks into place.

“It’s easy to believe your own bullshit if you’ve been making a project for 18 months, but when your album concept hits you in the face in the real world [with that fan] – wow.” He rolls up his short-sleeved white shirt to show NME his tattoos, which take centre stage on the album cover: a lion on his midriff; the words ‘don’t forget to live’ on his right arm.

“I never wanted the album to be an homage to my idols; it’s almost like I’m ready to leave them behind. Cheers Bowie, cheers Freddie, thanks Mick. I got it. We put people on pedestals and don’t give ourselves enough credit. You realise that the photograph on the wall never had any fucking answers – all the answers came from within me.”

It’s a beautiful concept to explore over the course of an album, but one that needs to be told in real time. That’s why ‘Idols’ has a second part, to be released in due course, tracking Harrison’s 18-month journey through 27 songs of rock opera. “That’s why I fuck with Charli [XCX] – she almost put out a double album in 2024,” he smirks. “I think we’re a little bit intertwined, me and her, because we’re completely from the left field.

“Part one is about the reclamation of yourself: ‘All you are is a self-fulfilling prophecy / A product of your own temptation.’ Part two is the dark and downward spiral to the inevitable realisation that I’m not going to be here forever – who do I want to spend my life with? Mortality. Part two plummets you back down to earth, and it’s a little bit more cynical.”

In the context of the second summer of Britpop, ‘Idols’ slots in perfectly – emitting light and hope in a manner that we haven’t seen from Yungblud before. Spurred on by his fanbase, you can tell this warm, fuzzy feeling is running through his veins – perhaps stronger than ever.

On his phone, he shows NME the leopard print floor for the space he’s planning to open in London, and some studio sessions from a bucket list collaboration that he can’t yet reveal. He’s giddy. Hyper, even. It took plenty of work and a revitalisation of sorts, but the result is definitive: Dominic Harrison is proud to be Yungblud once again.

Yungblud’s ‘Idols’ is released June 20 via Locomotion Recordings/Capitol Records

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