While discussing his latest studio album Idols, the British musician Yungblud likened the record to a saving grace. “This album was almost like my last chance,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “If I hadn’t been sure of what I was making, I don’t think there would’ve been a way back for me.” But while he was considering which path could carry him back, he was also intent on paving a lane that would move him into the future and shape his legacy in the process. Yungblud grapples with it all in the first trailer for his forthcoming documentary Yungblud: Are You Ready, Boy?, in theaters Aug. 20 and 24.
“We’ve been away for a year now. It’s like, ‘All right, let’s go,’” Yungblud says in the clip. “I feel like I am sailing uncharted waters. I need to figure out who I am as an adult, as a man.” The 27-year-old feels the pressure swelling from the inside out. It’s not only his legacy on the line from an internal perspective, but also the expectations of the audience he’s amassed over the years. “I think I’m letting everyone down,” he says. “Yes, I am. Yes, I am.” In some ways, that’s what Idols is all about — a certain freedom from external pressure. “If this is the last thing you are ever going to say,” he continues, “make sure that it’s everything that you’ve ever wanted to leave behind.”
Are You Ready, Boy? was directed by Paul Dugdale and brings together behind-the-scenes footage with a dozen live performances from Idols. The film was produced by B.R.A.T Productions in association with Aldgate Pictures and will screen in 30 countries internationally through Trafalgar Releasing.
“I wanted to make a film that truly documents where we are right now, at this moment, around the release of my most ambitious album to date,” Yungblud shared in a recent statement about the film. “Berlin has always radiated complete, unfiltered truth. Every time I’ve visited Hansa Studios, it’s just fucking iconic. You can feel the history in Hansa; it’s in the silence between takes, the ceiling looming over you. You’re standing in the shadows of all these legends and asking yourself ‘Who the fuck am I? And what am I gonna leave behind?’”
Dugdale added, “When we made this film, it was in that special twilight zone between the record being finished and people hearing it for the first time. I always think of that moment before a release as such a unique time for an artist, and it’s an extraordinary period to document because we can enter into it without any external noise or pre-conception. It allowed us to make something unaffected by the outside world, and there’s a really pleasing purity about that. We got to live in a moment with Dom, free of any external opinion and start a relationship from a totally blank canvas.”
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