‘I have the courage to be exposed’: How Yungblud became Britain’s biggest rock star | music

IIn November, Dominic Harrison, known as Yungblud, received three Grammy nominations. The news that he has become the first British artist in history to be nominated multiple times in the awards’ rock categories came as a stunning finale to what has been, by all accounts, an exceptional year for the 28-year-old singer-songwriter.

In June, his fourth studio album, Idols, entered the UK charts at number one, beating its closest competitor by 50%. In the same month, his annual festival and headliner, Bludfest, attracted an audience of 30,000 to The National Bowl in Milton Keynes. In July, he played in Back to the Beginning, the farewell performance by Black Sabbath, whose frontman Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days after the concert. On a bill almost comically full of heavy metal stars paying homage — Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Slayer — his rendition of Black Sabbath’s 1972 hit “Changes” unexpectedly stole the show, and seemed to gain him a whole new audience in the process: The crowd at the concert was much more heavily skewed than the Gen Z fans that Harrison traditionally attracts.

The following performance is worth watching on YouTube. You can see Harrison winning over the audience as the song progresses: at the end, there are audience members tearfully singing along. “I wasn’t surprised at all,” says Billy Corgan, frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins, who also performed in concert that day. “And I say this without reservation, and as a heavy metal fan for 50 years. Because Dom has one of the greatest voices in the history of music, and as great as that may sound, there’s no hype in what I’m saying.”

It earned him the respect of other august rock figures: Metallica’s Kirk Hammett approached him and told him he loved what he did, and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler not only called Harrison a “brother from another mother,” but recruited him as a collaborator. Aerosmith and Yungblud’s EP One More Time was released in November, topping the charts in the UK and becoming Harrison’s first top 10 hit in the US. “I’m sitting here at the end of the year talking to you, trying to figure it out,” Harrison says. “What the hell is going on?”

On a video call from Los Angeles, where he is working on a new album, he was clearly happy about his sudden rise, partly because it seemed unlikely.

Harrison is no one’s idea of ​​a crucial case celebrity. Since the release of his debut in 2018, his work has consistently attracted reviews ranging from average to hostile. He’s never had a hit single: his biggest hit of 2019, 11 Minutes, stalled outside the Top 50. As he points out, outside of his famously rabid fanbase, who call themselves the Black Hearts Club, people might know the name Yungblud, but would have a hard time naming one of his songs. He says he only started Bludfest because no festivals would book him, and he’s at a loss as to where to sit an artist whose discography ranges from rap to punk to pop to hard rock to indie. “I wasn’t poppy enough for some of them, and I wasn’t heavy enough to play rock festivals, so I had to start my own business. The festivals that didn’t give me the venues I wanted cost a lot, £200 to £500 a ticket, so we started selling tickets at £45.”

He optimistically notes that this year’s Bludfest could attract a crowd of “50 to 60,000 people” — an example of how “disaster always turns into opportunity for me.” His lack of “a billion songs that Joe Blog knows in the bar” is a bonus, because “I’m never beholden to one song, nor am I defined by it the way some other artists are.” If the press has looked askance at his earnest pronouncements about politics, mental health, toxic masculinity, trans rights, his experiments with androgyny and his caricature – all evidence of someone trying too hard – this is what he thinks his fans love about him: “I think it’s an innate sense of honesty, the courage to reveal who I am. I’ve always been too much for some people, but I’ve told the truth completely in real time through my music even if I’m lost While doing this.

He says his career was always going in an unlikely way, from the moment he left his hometown of Doncaster for London (he briefly shared a flat with another would-be pop star, Lewis Capaldi). “No record label in the UK could touch me. I remember someone said: ‘This music will never get played on Radio 1.’ I thought: ‘Well, I can’t rely on getting music out the old way, I can’t rely on good publicity and press.’ I had to make videos on my phone instead and post them on social media: Well, here’s a song I wrote called King Charles, and it’s about Brexit.

The online views started piling up. “People started sending me direct messages and I started replying to them: No one cared in England, the kids were in Holland. I had a party there and we sold out 150 tickets in 10 minutes. I remember arriving in a van and there were kids outside the venue when we pulled up. I loved the Clash and had seen pictures of Joe Strummer smoking outside gigs with his fans, so that’s what I did: I stood with them all day and brought them cups of tea. That’s how it all started – all I focused on was the fans, meeting them, and I didn’t think I was I was building a brand or a community or something.

But it clearly was: by chance, Harrison began his career at the point where the influence of rock and pop’s traditional gatekeepers—the music press and radio—was beginning to diminish dramatically, and the kind of social media that fueled the grassroots approach he was forced to take became crucial. US label Geffen took the bait, and by 2020, Harrison’s fan base had grown to the point that his second album, Weird!, topped the UK charts. So did its eponymous successor, despite the fact that Harrison was so dissatisfied with it that he sank into depression after its release.

Along the way, he met some celebrity supporters, including his “hero” Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, who appeared in the video for his single “The Funeral.” However, Harrison says he was “very nervous” when he was asked to perform in the Back to the Beginning show. For one thing, he assumed he’d be playing an uptempo Black Sabbath song, not a ballad. On the other hand, grizzled heavy metal fans are not known to tolerate beautiful young male pop stars, whether they are the kind of stars they are attracted to or not. “There were about 50,000 people,” he says. “Twenty-five thousand have no idea who I am, fifteen thousand think I’m a poser, and maybe ten thousand, one of their kids mentioned me to them.

“But the minute I got on stage, everything went quiet. I grew up in a guitar shop [his father owned one]I’ve always been around the greats of rock music – my father, my uncles and people who worked there and played in bands around Doncaster. This is what I grew up with. “This is where I come from, this will bring me home,” I thought.

Since then, the acclaim has continued. “I truly believe that when it’s all said and done, he’ll stand up there with the greats,” Corgan says. “And it’s worth noting that Ozzy thought so too.” On Friday, Yungblud released a new version of his hit song Zombie featuring Smashing Pumpkins – marking the American band’s first ever collaborative release with another artist.

Harrison says he recently received an “amazing” letter from Robbie Williams, and that his recent US tour has attracted a much wider audience – “from kids to 70-year-olds”.

“It’s been a beautiful year,” he says of 2025, understandably excited about the future. “It’s limitless, and exciting.”