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‘You’re Making Bad Art’: How Mainstream Success Hurt Yungblud & Led to New Album ‘IDOLS’

Rolling Stone AU/NZ sits down with Yungblud to talk about the long journey to his fourth studio album, ‘IDOLS’

Yungblud

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When Yungblud dropped his second album, Weird, in December 2020, the UK artist hit the mainstream.

As the Doncaster-born songwriter, real name Dominic Harrison, tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ, he began writing what would eventually materialise as his new fourth album, IDOLS, on January 2nd, 2021. But there was just one problem: Weird was a hit. He scored his first #1 record in his home country, and sold more copies than ever before.

And as Yungblud’s status began to rise, so did the opinions from outside voices.

The now-27-year-old admits that he “let go of the reins a little bit” and iced IDOLS while he began working on what would become his self-titled album released in 2022. Though he insists he holds a special place for that record, which still topped charts in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, just to name a few countries, he concedes it wasn’t what was true to him.

“When you’re going in with songwriters, you have seven people a week telling you where you should go next,” he says.

“So as much as there were great songs on the album, and I loved that album, it did really well, I always will tell the truth. On that album, the first iteration of Yungblud was over. A 19-year-old in pink socks talking about politics is over. Sorry to people who fucking don’t want it to be, but it is. And I needed to take on a new direction and I needed to feel something.

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“I think you can tell when music is trying to be commercially successful because it’s shorter, it’s hookier, it’s a little bit more vapid. It’s a little bit easier to eat, you know what I mean? That was never my idea,” he explains.

“I was always singing from the beginning about what was completely real to me and completely truthful. Everyone was like, ‘No, this is working right now’. Everyone had an opinion about what Yungblud should be and what Yungblud should do next.”

“I remember I was drinking too much, I had a really bad relationship with food. So I was trying to just not feel anything at all… you’re unhappy, you’re unfulfilled artistically,  you’re making bad art. Not bad art, but you could be making better art.”

The desire to “feel something” again, he says happened last year when he stepped out on stage for the inaugural Bludfest in the UK; a music festival he created with the aim to make music “more accessible,” with ticket prices capped at £49.50 ($AU103).

“It became about us and the umbrella of Yungblud and I could exist as Dom underneath it,” he explains.

“The most important thing is we’re all there for this mutual idea. And, I went away and I really was like, ‘It’s time to finish the album. It’s time to finish IDOLS‘. I’m grateful, and I don’t regret one minute of this journey because it’s right. I’ve never been more clear.”

And unlike the 2022 album, Yungblud got back to work on IDOLS not with a stack of producers and songwriters, but only with his best mate Matt Schwartz, who also produced 2018 debut, 21st Century Liability. The result is arguably Yungblud’s best work to date.

“When you make an album from your heart and not from your head, the opinions don’t matter because it came from within me and I made this for me,” he says.

“I needed to get this out. You can physically hear a journey and a person becoming a different person throughout an hour’s worth of music, you know what I mean? It’s been amazing. I’ve had so much fun making this, and I really think we made something five dimensional. There’s a million different messages in it that you will hear when you go back and listen to it again.

“When I put a song like ‘Ghosts’ on, I can’t believe when I sing it in a rehearsal, I’m like ‘I can’t believe this is my song,’ you know what I mean? It’s sick.”

Yungblud’s IDOLS is out now.