Yungblud has spoken to NME to give the exclusive lowdown on his “positive” new Britpop-inspired album – which he compared to the likes of Oasis, The Verve, Primal Scream, My Chemical Romance, David Bowie and Madonna. Watch our video interview with the artist below.
The pop-punk provocateur was speaking to NME to launch his new festival, BludFest – set to take place in Milton Keynes this August. Yungblud – real name Dominic Harrison – said that he’d recently been taking stock to mark “the end of a chapter” and was in the process of “going into new music, which I can’t wait for you to hear”.
“I’m 27 next and for a character like me it’s either death or rebirth,” he said. “This point has been amazing up to now. I’ll never lose what it’s about in terms of Yungblud and the soul of it – but musically, this next album is something I’ve been working on for two years and it’s a fucking adventure.
“It’s a full concept that you can play from start to finish.”
Elaborating on the follow-up to his 2022 self-titled third album, Yungblud said: “It’s been made in England. It’s been made in the North, and I flip the narrative where I’ve sung about darkness. This album is the light. It’s all about getting through it; it’s positive.
“It’s that thing in your stomach when you listen to Oasis, or The Verve, or Bowie, or Suede, or Madonna. It makes me feel like I can get up today. It makes me feel like I’m invincible and that I can do anything – that’s what this new album sounds like.”
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Yungblud went on to namecheck Stone Roses and Amy Winehouse as influences, along with “everything that has fundamentally done work on my soul”.
“Everything up to now has been about your heart and your head and making sure that I’m educated, that I use my voice,” he explained. “That I speak from the heart, meet people, be loud, be bratty, be unapologetic, be crazy. This is [me asking] ‘What does my soul want to say? What do I feel in my fingertips when I stick on [Oasis’] ‘Live Forever’, [The Verve’s] ‘Valium Skies’ or [Primal Scream‘s] ‘Screamadelica’?”
He continued: “It’ll be a great ‘Urban Hymns’ or ’Screamadelica’. I know the old dudes are going to leather me in the comments for that but I don’t give a fuck because I’m going to go there. If you listen to it, then it’s that from a new perspective.”
Harrison noted that the mantra of the record would be “Come together, look each other in the eye, be human”, as opposed saying “Fuck you, this is the world we’ve got to get to”.
Doubling down on the status of the record as a concrete concept album, he went on: “It’s a ’Tommy’, it’s a ‘Quadrophenia’ [The Who]. It’s ‘A Night At The Opera’ [Queen]. It’s a ‘Black Parade’ [My Chemical Romance]. It’s an ‘Urban Hymns’. It’s a thing that’s intended to be listened to from start to finish, and it’s pushed me harder and made me gut myself harder than anything before.
“We locked ourselves in a studio in Leeds and just felt. We shut the world out instead of asking, ‘What’s popping on this?’ ‘What’s the state of art’ or whatever. Fuck that. Could this album have been written 50 years ago? Could this album be written in 50 years time? Fucking everything else. It just is.”
He added: “I’ve always led from truth. We got fucking further than I ever thought we would get, and I can say that. I’m down. It’s all about each other. We might as well just try and reach for fucking Queen, Bowie and The Verve – because they didn’t even know what they were doing at the time. I hope people like it, because it’s fundamentally the most truthful I’ve been able to be since [2018 debut] ’21st Century Liability’. I’ve approached this album like I’ve just started.”
Harrison also said that he was hatching “a little masterplan” in terms of how to roll out the album, teasing that fans might be able to get a taster of it at this summer’s BludFest.
“I’ve got loads of songs,” he said. “In the past year since my last album, I’ve been experimenting and dropping songs in realtime. ‘Lowlife’ sounds completely different to ‘Happier’ which sounds completely different to ‘Hated’ which sounds completely different to [recent single] ‘When We Die (Can We Still Get High)’ with Lil Yachty. Where do I want to go? It’s all been about having fun with it. The answer came that I’m going to make this album that I’ve been trying to make for two years.”
He added: “There’s a mixtape of songs that I’ve written and love that might not make any sense but I think are fucking sick, so I’m just going to drop them, going into BludFest and in the meantime create a fucking opus.”
Check out our full interview with Yungblud here, where he also discussed taking stock of his career so far, how he built his community of fans and online spat with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy.
This week also saw Yungblud play a surprise gig at Camden Market in London to launch BludFest. Taking place on Sunday August 11, the festival will see a headline set from Yungblud alongside a line-up featuring recent collaborator Lil Yachty, as well as Soft Play, Nessa Barrett, The Damned, Lola Young, Jazmin Bean and many more.
Tickets will go on sale at 10am this Friday (March 22) and will be available here.