The pop star bringing real rock music back from the dead

Telegraph

05-04-2025

A couple of years ago, after almost a decade as Yungblud – the angsty, sweary, pink-socked king of Gen Z outcasts everywhere – the musician Dominic Harrison considered retiring his stage name. 'I was like, how the f--- am I gonna do this forever,' he says. 'I'm such a staple of youth.'
In want of a clean start, he put on a music festival, Bludfest, in Milton Keynes last summer, intended as 'a goodbye to what people had known up to that point. I thought, 'I need to evolve. I need to cocoon. I need to figure out who I'm gonna be.''
If he had ended it there, the Yungblud project would surely have been deemed a success: ­Harrison's furious rap-inflected pop-rock had earned him two consecutive UK number-one albums, 7.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, more than three ­billion global streams, world tours, a ­business empire reportedly on the way to being worth £75 million, a reputation as a rare modern star with something to say, and an almost worryingly devoted teenage following.
Though the Yorkshireman's rise was largely lost on older gen­er­ations, cannier observers among them recognised him as a major ­talent: Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters ' frontman, declared Yungblud the future of rock 'n' roll, while in 2022, in what felt like a baton-passing ­gesture, Mick Jagger invited him backstage at a Rolling Stones gig and gave him a guitar.
By the time Bludfest came around last August, Harrison was greeted by a stadium full of 30,000 beaming faces of all ages – and had a swift change of heart about rebranding. 'That day, Yungblud became bigger than the dude in the pink socks,' he says. 'It became a culture, and I'm Dom, within it. It made me really fall in love with the name again.'
If the withering hand of time is the issue, he could, I offer, just drop the 'Yung'. Harrison takes this suggestion with unintended earnestness. 'Yeah, Blud... Mister Blud. We'll see.' He might still abandon the name altogether, he adds, with a shrug. 'Maybe it'll be a Ziggy ­Stardust thing.'
Until then, allow him to introduce Yungblud 2.0: older, wiser, cleaner, leaner, and every bit as ­verbose. We meet in an 11th-floor suite at the Standard hotel in King's Cross. Far below, I can just about make out a queue of black-clad fans forming outside Scala, the venue in which Harrison will launch his new era with a free show this ­evening. They're eight hours early.
Harrison sashays in artfully late and rigorously apologetic. He's only come a couple of miles, from his home in Primrose Hill, but, as an insomniac, mornings have never been his strong point. He is dressed as if for the funeral of a goth pirate: black silk shirt, pinstripe waistcoat and suit trousers, buckled cavalier boots over those signature socks, raven-black hair gelled back but for a single lank strand, eyes full of kohl.
Misery could accessorise well with all that, but Harrison is a knot of frenetic, likeable energy – so much so that I'm slightly nervous when a coffee arrives for him. At times, his hyperactivity has been a symptom of anxiety; today he insists it's purely excitement for Idols, his ambitious new double album that sees him splash around in the deep pool of his influences, from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury to West Side Story and Led Zeppelin.
It is, he says, 'the most emotionally pure, honest thing I've made' since his 2018 debut 21st Century Liability. 'I wanted to make something without thinking what the fans will think. Previously, I've leant on them as a crutch.'
A change of heart came when he 'hit 27' last August, and started to see life beyond membership of the morbid 'club' associated with that age. 'It was a turning point, I wanted to re-evaluate,' he says. 'To tell you the truth, when my last album came out, I really felt like I'd compromised and become a ­pastiche of myself.'
He's referring to the 2022 album Yungblud, in which he delivered, he says, exactly what 'was expected of me. Yungblud had become this thing that was very boxed in. You knew what he sounded like, what he dressed like.'
A performer who tends to read his own reviews, he found himself agreeing with even his harshest critics. 'I was like, you're right, I'm not telling the truth, I am over­compensating and I reek of insecurity at times.'
The new record is his attempt to put things right. Four years in the making, Idols kicks off with Hello Heaven, Hello, a nine-minute string-laden epic that could easily have been carved into three ­separate songs, especially in the age of 120-second TikTok ditties. It's a fair indication of the generally wild scope of the album, and an undeniably impressive statement of intent.
Its live debut on The Jonathan Ross Show last month also showed that Harrison has one of the most versatile voices in contemporary rock. In a four-minute cut-for-TV version, he managed to sound variously like Liam Gallagher, Eddie Vedder and Axl Rose.
'I've had to start getting singing lessons,' he admits. 'In the past, I've almost been able to cheat my way through it, have a couple of drinks and if my voice is hoarse, that's rock 'n' roll, but this is real singing.'
He sought out Mary Hammond, the founding head of musical theatre at the Royal Academy of Music, who's worked with everyone from West End musical stalwarts to Black Sabbath and Florence Welch. 'I think she's done Chris Martin and Bono, too,' says Harrison. 'She made me audition with scales. But she's my best mate now.'
The most important thing Hammond taught him was how to look after his voice so he could sing live eight times a week without losing it. 'She was saying I was hitting this Axl Rose s---, 'but look at where his voice is now'. I had to take singing seriously. So I quit drinking and started working out excessively.'
There began a period of self-reflection that included breaking up (at least temporarily) with his long-term girlfriend, the American musician and actress Jesse Jo Stark, going sober-ish and taking up boxing. This new regime has given him the focus and ­physique of a flyweight prize fighter. It's also done wonders for his ­anxiety and the ADHD that was diagnosed in childhood.
'I was thinking, I've got to fight back against every critic's review that goes around in my head at night, every person that doesn't like me, every person that depends on me so heavily.' He took it all out on a punchbag.
I assumed he stopped drinking (bar the odd pint 'with a roast') because he liked alcohol a little too much, but, he says, 'It was all an amalgamation. I wasn't really happy, I was trying to distract myself. It was a spiral. I had a really tough relationship with food and I was drinking a lot, and I had this kind of... addiction to a ­co-dependent relationship with my fanbase.'
Having grown up in his father's guitar shop in Doncaster, Harrison's first love is rock music, a genre he's so far had to repress. 'In the past, it's been, 'Oh, we can't have a guitar solo; no one likes rock.' I love rock, but every­one's been like, 'No! Rap, man, rap!'' With Idols, he fights back. 'On this album, I turned the guitars up,' he says. 'I wanted to be adherent to Zeppelin in the same way the Stones were to Muddy Waters or Oasis ripped off the Kinks.'
I tell him that, walking past the growing queue at Scala, I noted that almost everybody in it was female. 'It's funny, I'm very polarising for dudes,' he says. 'But I think a lot of guys are going to like Idols because it's heavy. And that excites me, because I've really embraced my masculinity on this album, which is a weird thing to say in 2025.
'There's a big [anti-men] narrative online, and a lot of bulls---. Look at Andrew Tate; young males experience that and see the world through that lens, but masculinity also needs to showcase rich emotion and love. You've either got to be hard as f---, or you're wet and soppy – and there needs to be a hybrid. With me I'm like, I am ­masculine. I am aggressive. I like boxing. But also, I'll cry and might put on a skirt. Whatever, it makes me feel more masculine when I wear a kilt.'
Growing up, Harrison was a self-professed outsider, and bullied remorselessly. How would he have ended up if he hadn't found an ­outlet in performance? 'I'd be living online,' he says, 'bottling up anger, putting it into a really dark, toxic place.'
As it was, the teenage Harrison sought refuge in music and drama, moving to London at 16 to enrol at ArtsEd, an independent performing arts school – a decision fully ­supported by his relatively well-to-do parents (dad's shop was a success, mum managed a deli), who covered his £75-a-week rent for a houseshare in the capital. His first housemate was 'a cat lady called Marge'; later came fellow musician Lewis Capaldi, who's still a close friend.
Alongside his studies at ArtsEd, he worked briefly as an actor, landing bit parts in Emmerdale and Disney's teen musical series The Lodge. His critics never let him forget any of this. His education is proof he was an industry plant, they insist. He cannot be a punk if he comes from a happy home, they argue. (Anybody who saw Louis Theroux's 2022 BBC documentary about Yungblud will know that while it may have been comfortable, it was far from harmonious, not least due to his father's anger issues.)
Then his spunky early music felt so custom-built for Gen Z – its lyrics all mental-health crises, not liking your parents and sexual fluidity – that it was seen as a cynical play to the lucrative freaks-and-geeks market. Last year, Harrison's twin ventures of Bludfest and his fashion brand Beautifully Romanticised Accidentally Traumatized (BRAT for short) were taken as further evidence that he has a keen eye on the bottom line: if he's a punk, he's a commercially savvy one, and that seems to rile people. A sample Reddit thread is titled: 'Is YungBlug [sic] a Major Grifter and a Threat to Young People?'
His fans, of course, see only authenticity. Many identify as troubled outcasts like him – and their devotion tends towards the religious. As well as the ADHD and ­anxiety, Harrison had his first suicidal thought at 13 and has suffered from depression and body dysmorphia.
His candidness about his struggles led to a reputation as 'the mental-health guy', a tag that, he says, has become 'so frustrating. Everyone wants an answer: kids come up to me and say I've saved their life and I'm like, 'I don't know you.' Maybe something I said or did gave them some confidence, but I didn't do anything.'
He used to think TikTok was 'punk as f---', but is now far more wary of the online world. 'It makes you question everything. I had to really deal with my relationship with it because opinion in real time suffocates art.' How far we've fallen since the golden age of rock. 'Could you imagine day one if [Dave] Gilmour was putting out Dark Side of the Moon online? Everyone would be like, 'What the f--- is this?!' You get discouraged.'
So Yungblud 2.0 stays offline as much as possible, and he's far better for it, fighting fit and ready for whatever lies ahead. Bludfest will return to Milton Keynes this summer, then go international. A tour will follow at some point. Before that, he'll release the album he's always wanted to make.
'Bowie, Freddie, Bono – I'm trying to reach for that,' he says, eyes widening. A Cheshire Cat grin spreads across his face. 'Now, people might be like 'Good luck with that...', but I'm gonna try my best.'