UNLOCKINGSITE

Yungblud has built a career around his charisma. His brash, unfiltered persona has seen him dye his hair every color imaginable, wear skirts on stage and cultivate a cult teenage following drawn to his progressive views, which are often shouted over brattish pop-punk anthems. But that boldness hasn’t come without backlash, as the loud-mouthed rocker has faced relentless scrutiny, surrounding everything from the authenticity of his sexual fluidity to doubts about his working-class roots.

In the past, he’d throw two fingers up to the critics and carry on as if unbothered. But behind the scenes, he was quietly unraveling, masking the pain he felt through drinking, drugs, and food. “I’d try anything to numb myself,” he says, speaking to PAPER via Zoom from a green room in London ahead of a Nine Inch Nails concert. As he leans into the camera, his eyes pierce through the screen, framed by smudged day-old eyeliner, like Robert Smith or Brian Molko, his all-black ensemble consisting of skinny jeans and a loose-fitting silk shirt, unbuttoned enough to reveal his sternum. “I put on 35 kilos, I mean, it was crazy because I was just binging and trying to alleviate any sense of responsibility or any sense of feeling for myself,” he tells us.

The Yungblud you’re hearing on his new album Idols, his fourth full-length LP, is far from previous iterations. The 27-year-old from Doncaster is finally dropping any guise, revealing the real Dominic Richard Harrison in his rawest form. He’s ditched the performative chaos and is significantly more grounded, mature and, most notably, sober. “I felt like a hamster on a wheel,” he explains. “This album is all about self-reclamation. When you become such a staple of youth, and that big old age of 27 hits you, even though it’s a cliché, you have to think about what you want and what’s going to make you happy. You either die or become a pastiche of yourself.”

Born into a working-class family in northern England, Dom moved to London at the age of 18. He lived in houseshares, squats and on friends’ sofas, studying at an arts college while picking up bit parts on British TV. His breakthrough came with the 2019 EP, underrated youth, which featured the hit single “Parents.” It’s an in-your-face amalgamation of pop and punk influences, with Yungblud’s voice swaggering over a plonking piano and swinging guitar chorus. The lyrics very much sum up the vibe he was on at the time: “My daddy put a gun to my head/ Said, “If you kiss a boy I’m gonna shoot you dead”/ So I tied him up with gaffa tape /And locked him in a shed/ Then I went out to the garden/ And I fucked my best friend.”

“When I started this at 18, I never fucking expected to get this big,” he says. “For a start, I called myself fucking Yungblud. I was singing about Brexit. I didn’t know what my gender was. I was confused about my sexuality. Confused about everything. But fuck it, I was writing it in the moment.” Building on this success, he released the 2020 British chart-topper, weird!, and 2022’s YUNGBLUD, which scored him his first top 10 entry on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart, debuting at No. 3.

Nevertheless, there was always sincerity to Yungblud, which was previously hidden under layers of eyeliner and drugstore hair dye. It became more apparent last year with the launch of BludFest, his festival in the UK city Milton Keynes. He described it as a “physical world” not just for himself and his fanbase, but for anyone curious enough to step inside. Committed to accessibility, he insisted on fair pricing, making the festival affordable for working-class fans like himself. This move earned him an unexpected kinship with personal hero and fellow fair-pricing advocate, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. “He’s everything I admire in a musician: he knows who he is and understands that many people have preceded him to lay the groundwork for what you might call the modern music business,” he tells PAPER. “He’s super talented, but not lost in it like so many, which is why I’m so bullish on him having the brightest of futures.”

Of course, even this led to scrutiny due to the festival being promoted by AEG (one of the world’s largest live music presenters), which led to a now-deleted viral TikTok post questioning Dom’s legitimacy. As a result, he found himself defending the festival in various posts and interviews. Exhausted by the graft, he decided to head up north with long-time collaborators producer Matt Schwartz and guitarist Adam Warrington, whom he’d known since teenagehood. “When you’re in a room with songwriters, art can be perceived as good, even if it’s mediocre,” he says. “So on this album, I was like, I’m going back to the north, and I’m gonna take the producer who wrote my first album with me, and I’m gonna take my guitar player who I’ve known since I was 15, and I’m gonna make a record with my family. They know what I’ve been through, they know what I’ve handled, and they know when I’m not being authentic.”

“I just was like, I’m gonna shut everyone out, even the people I love, and I’m gonna make something that I can truly stand by artistically and be proud of,” he says, hinting at his breakup with Jesse Jo Stark, who he dated from 2020 until earlier this year. “We wanted to make something of extreme depth in a time where everyone just wants a dopamine hit. I want to elongate the imagination and make a journey.” The result is something more classic rock, in the spirit of his heroes AC/DC, Bowie, or Ozzy Osbourne. Who, funnily enough, he sees as a mentor and personal friend.

Sharon Osbourne has been quick to commend Dom for his foray back into rock ‘n’ roll, as she tells PAPER: “I’m so happy he’s gone more classic rock. You need to break the norm and do your own thing, don’t fit into the little boxes people put you in,” she says. “It’s so rare, and he reminds me so much of my husband, personality-wise, who just tells you how it is. You ask him a question, and he will answer with the truth. They’re like an open book, and they both wear their heart on their sleeve.”

That same earnestness pulsates through Idols, the first installment of what Dom calls his “rock opera.” The album explores themes of hero-worship and external validation, wrapped in anthemic guitar riffs and raw emotion. It’s a full-throttle journey into self-reclamation. The nine-minute opener, “Hello Heaven Hello,” instantly commands attention, eschewing palatable mainstream hooks in favor of sprawling, cathartic storytelling over grand rock arrangements. It’s immediately evident that Yungblud isn’t chasing hits anymore; he’s picked candor over clout.

Music at the moment is often dominated by TikTok soundbites, but you’ve chosen to release a two-part rock opera with a nine-minute opening track. What inspired this?

What’s cool about the world right now is that there are no rules; if it’s truthful, it will resonate. Obviously, when I told the label “Hello Hevan Hello” was nine minutes long they went fucking green, but I was like, That’s what I’m here to do. I’m lucky to have based myself in a community, and a meaning, and a message. I’m not a fucking pop star in the fact that, if I don’t put a hit next, my career’s over.

Music is here and gone so quickly because no one is making timeless ideas anymore. It’s all about a trend that becomes pretty fucking lame, quickly. I wanted to just try my best to make something timeless. I didn’t want to make something that sounded like the past, because there are too many pastiche bands in rock music. I want to take a feeling that Urban Hymns or Rumors or Dark Side of the Moon, or Appetite for Destruction gave me, and be like, “How can I recreate this into modern music?”

It still feels so personal, despite its scale, and it reminds me of how you said your dad would play classic rock in his guitar shops when you were growing up. How much of that did you channel into this?

People questioned my authenticity and said that I had everything handed to me because I grew up in a guitar shop, so I would hide this about myself. But on this album, I have shown I have the biggest knowledge of rock music of anyone in the world, under the age of 30, because I grew up on a guitar shop counter. My favorite smells of my childhood were vintage, rotting instruments, amplifier glue, wires that were too hot and beer on top of the counter. That’s what this album sounds like.

You’ve always been quite a divisive character, and it felt like previous albums leaned into that. But now, you’re not fighting anyone anymore, and you’re just doing your own thing. How did you reach that point?

When you realize that what people think about you is completely out of your control, you can start to work on yourself. It started to affect my health and it got pretty fucking dark. I was struggling with alcohol, struggling with food, I had a really strange addiction to food, because I didn’t want to feel anything and I wanted to distract myself. I didn’t want to address what people were saying about me. But now, when I read a bunch of hate on the internet, I laugh and find it kind of funny, because I’m clear, I’m sober. It’s not out of control, and I’m not turning to anything for distraction.

Do you feel like you dropped a persona?

People often ask me if Yungblud is a character. At the beginning, absolutely not. I was 18 in pink socks, fucking all about it. But then again, I hid behind it because I didn’t know where to go. That’s why my last album, Yungblud, had no great songs on it. But I don’t regret it, because it gave me this epiphany. I realized I was hiding behind something. I’ve alleviated this side of negativity and started having fun and giving it every ounce of energy I’ve got. I’ve got my bollocks back. I’ve come out of the gate and said, “Fuck everyone. I’m having this.” And it’s all in the name of love, obviously. But I’ve learned how to deal with every sort of questioning. I’ve made an album about being present in the moment and real life, and the fundamentals of life and mortality.

It feels like you’re on a bit of a Ziggy Stardust vibe at the moment. And you’ve previously hinted at dropping the “Yung” from your name. Do you see that happening at all soon?

BludFest helped me fall in love with the name again. Because people asked how I could be Yungblud forever. I can’t be a 45-year-old guy trying to be 18 like a lot of rockstars are doing, you know singing about high school and shit. BludFest was done to make me go, “Where the hell am I? Where is this whole thing at? I’m gonna get 35,000 people into a field and see if it gives me an answer,” because it might have been the end.

But it was so much bigger than me running around being a punk kid in pink socks. It was families, babies, mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, everyone coming together. I realized Yungblud is bigger than me, and Dom can exist within this umbrella. The name can become something different. That’s when it starts to become like Green Day or Guns N’ Roses or Coldplay, where we don’t even associate Billy Joe or Chris Martin with it. With AC/DC, you don’t just think about Angus Young or Brian Johnson. You think about the lightning bolt and the horns and “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll).” It’s so much bigger than just the person.

It seems that you’re leaning more toward a masculine image. Why’s that?

At this point in my life, I’m proud of who I am. I feel like a boy, and I feel in that zone. I feel a bit more hot-blooded than ever; I’m a lot more sexually driven than I have ever been. I’m an extremely sexual person, and sometimes I’ve not shown that. I want to play with that because I feel more confident. What’s important, at the minute, when I look at my 18-year-old sister’s generation, they’re the sickest, because they came from a byproduct of our generation leading a movement of love in terms of gender, sexuality and racial equality. They’re just like, “Yeah, man, whatever you are, that’s fucking dope.” But I worry about the generation under them, and I worry about young boys at the moment.

Because if you’re a 12-year-old lad, your algorithm shows you everything. You’re either reading a “man-hating” narrative, because a lot of people feel like their voices have been oppressed, or you are reading Andrew Tate. And he’s telling them that masculinity is about fucking hurting as many people and stepping as many people and that men are the way. There’s no middle ground. So I want to talk about my masculinity from a place of fluidity, respect, and love, and come at it from a left-leaning perspective saying, “This is the new version of masculinity, and I am a fucking boy. I’m a hot-blooded fucking boy. Some days I’m going to wear a parka and drink a lager, and some days I’m going to wear a skirt.”

How are you finding singledom?

Jesse Jo was my soulmate. Like, love my life. We still talk every Sunday. When that moment ended, I thought it was an “us” problem, but it wasn’t. It was a real “me” issue. I wasn’t clear in any regard. I’ve just been thinking about getting myself better and this music, and trying to stay as clear as possible. That woman is the love of my life, and still very much is, but at the moment, I have just been trying to work on myself to be a better brother, a better son, a better leader and a better lover as well. I needed this time to do things on my terms for a second.

You’ve been very vocal about cutting out the booze. Have you found that sobriety influenced your creativity?

It was all about control. When you’re pissed or hungover, you let mediocrity slide. When you’re clear and you’re in the middle of your head, you can fully say, “This is not good enough.” You face it head-on and accept the consequences. Now I’m like, “Right, that sucks. Fuck it. Change it.” Everything’s within my control. And look, I’m gonna have a Guinness with my Sunday roast, but I know that, like on a Friday night, I’m not getting pissed because I’m going to the boxing ring at 10 AM the next day. And there’s nothing worse than being hungover and sparring. So I’m in control of the consequences of it, as opposed to letting the consequences control me.

You’re saying you’re in an era of “self-reclaiming” — how do you think that will translate to your audience?

Fundamentally, people just want the truth out of me. Maybe you invest in an artist, or you invest in a writer, or you invest in a world. You want the truth, a sense of truth. This is the most emotional music I’ve ever made. I was previously labeled as a punk, but that world comes with so many fucking rules. That community is so gatekept, and this is more about emotional connection. It’s still wrapped in fucking attitude, it’s still wrapped in a sense of rebellion, but it’s all about emotional connection through rebellion. I’m not bothered about people streaming this album a billion times a week until they’re bored of it. I want it to be something they put on, start to finish, every week for the rest of their lives. If I know anything about what I’ve done in the past five years, I know my fans will love it.

Your fans are usually quite young. Are you hoping Idols will help you reach out to a broader range of people?

It’s fundamentally about getting bigger. I want to make a statement. I just learned that by disassociating myself from the world and using that in my music, it would disassociate people, which was almost the antithesis of what I wanted for Yungblud. But I want to say that everyone is welcome: wherever you’re from, whatever age you are. I try my best on this album to radiate that idea of life, humanity, unity, acceptance and put that at the forefront of my music. The range has gone from like 15 to 24 to like 30 to 70. Everyone is coming into this world, and it’s beautiful. Because what can truly make music, change the world, and change perception, is if the full spectrum of people is across it, you know?

This article is a collaboration between Marshall Group AB and PAPER.

Photography: Ellen von Unwerth
Styling: Mike Adler
Grooming: Luca Tullio
Set design: Caylah Jean

Tattoo artist: Melody Methakul

Photo assistants: Eduardo Valerrama, Andrew Espinal
Post-production: Ovidiu Oltean
Digital operator: Andrew Day
Videographer: Kalli Scherlis
Styling assistants: Zhané Norman, Joyce Esquenazi Mitrani
Set assistant: Anzo Gonzalez Diaz
Production assistants: Carolina Bishop, Henry Crawley

Chief creative officer: Brian Calle
Managing editor: Matthew Wille
Executive creative producer: Angelina Cantú
Music editor: Erica Campbell
Story: Georgia Evans
Graphic design: Jewel Baek
Location: Monsieur, Ludlow Hotel