Meet Yungblud: the poster boy of Gen Z

‘I broke my leg twice on the road in America,’ Yungblud is telling me, flicking fuchsia-tipped black hair back and getting acquainted with the plush orange sofa we’ve found in a quiet back room of a brightly lit Victoria Park café.

‘I fell off stage, broke my ankle, got back up, carried on and did a whole tour in a f***ing wheelchair. I nearly lost my mum in a car accident. I went from having £60 in my bank account to being internationally recognised across the world. I went through a very public relationship, kind of getting my heart broken, and tried to commit suicide twice,’ he reveals. ‘I’ve been in some really dark places but being Yungblud has enabled me to find a community and realise that I’m not alone and that there’s so many people going through the same struggles as me.’

It is a weird time of life for a 22-year-old punk rocker still known to his friends as Dominic Harrison from Doncaster — or ‘Dom from Donny!’ as he now cheerfully announces himself. In two short years since releasing his album, 21st Century Liability, he’s been virtually (and physically) unstoppable, a guitar-thrashing, drum-crashing, bottomless well of nu-rock that erupted like black gold into the Gen Z market. He’s been a whirling dervish on the chilly ES photoshoot all morning, performing pull-ups on monkey bars while semi-naked outside in the park, howling snippets of his favourite trap tracks and cracking into (quite passable) impressions of Bono.

I’m glad he’s sitting down now. Frankly, I’m glad I am, having heard (loud) volumes about Yungblud from enthralled fans and enraptured label types alike. So much success sounds exhausting. Last year he doubled said fan base to 2 million Instagram followers, 1.3m YouTube subscribers, clocked up more than 600m streams of his music on Spotify and 233m views of his videos, and sold out headline tours of the US, UK and the rest of Europe (the howling crescendo of his fans singing along, I’m told, adds 16 decibels to every concert, taking him past Metallica’s levels).

He has greater engagement on social media from his dedicated fans than even Grammy-sweeping megastar Billie Eilish (they’re with the same label, Interscope Records, and have become friends because they’re frequently seated together at industry dinners).

He sings bouncy, rock-powered earworms in a jaunty Yorkshire accent — think Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys, with the same gift for holding a tune — about gun violence, suicidal thoughts and — yes — gentrification in Sheffield. He dated the American singer Halsey (that’s the heartbreak he’s speaking about, but more of that later), then wrote a single with her. He wears garish amounts of eyeliner, dresses and fishnet stockings and idolises Eminem, Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga. And, a label exec tells me breathlessly while we’re on the shoot location, whether he’s in Wolverhampton or Washington, DC, some 7,000 teenagers wearing the same uniform pitch up. ‘I hate thinking about it like that,’ Yungblud says. ‘Then it becomes maths.’ Yungblud has rapidly entered voice-of-a-generation territory — or, ‘I’ve found a f***ing tribe’, as he puts it.

There’s something touching about all this unadulterated vulnerability. ‘Yungblud saved me,’ he says, tucking in to a lunch of butternut squash soup, banana and Karma Cola with genuine relish. ‘Because all I wanted was to find people who were like me, and now I have. Growing up, I felt like an alien.’ He neither deflects nor hides behind a PR team (we’re alone as we talk, which is increasingly unusual on the pop interview circuit). What’s his secret, then?

He laughs. ‘Someone came up to me at some f***ing hors d’oeuvre music event the other day and was like, “What’s the formula?” There isn’t a f***ing formula’, he says. ‘We’re a generation of metaphors, of art, and pictures and visuals — instead of things just being surface level, instead of words. We thrive off feelings rather than a thought.’ Uh huh, I say. An abstract guy, eh? That’s going to make this interview difficult. ‘But it goes hand in hand,’ he adds. ‘My music sounds so happy, but the lyrics are so dark.’

Too right. His fans call themselves the Black Hearts Club and form a devoted, supermassive online community. One recently counted how many in the community had posted their ‘black heart’ tattoos to Instagram, clocking 72,000. Are acts like him and Eilish part of an emo revival? ‘I love emo’, he says. ‘I think modern music is emo. It’s the new rock to me.’ He’s been criticised for controversial imagery and lyrics (in one music video, he shoots himself in the head). Surely his label worries? ‘Of course they do. They’re like, do you want to be liable for someone taking their own life? I’m like no, because it’s not about that, and my generation are too smart to interpret it like that.’ He says he’s ‘providing an escape’ and wants to convey to a disaffected youth that ‘you are not an alien for feeling this way’. As for anyone who tries to muzzle him? ‘If you try and put a dog collar on me, I’m going to bite ya.’

Part of the draw is that he’s unabashedly outspoken — although admittedly many of his positions feel more predictable than punk. He voted Labour in the last election and Remain in the EU referendum — the first election he was old enough to vote in. He spent a recent Friday in bed with a chest infection rage-scrolling through coverage of Brexit Day on Twitter. ‘This is exactly what my generation is fighting against,’ he says. ‘Naive, senseless hate that is wrapped up in the cling film of reality TV.’

Reality TV? ‘Take Boris Johnson. He’s just like Trump. He’s a reality TV star. He’s an influencer. It’s the same way pop stars sell records, mate. It’s just one PR stunt after another.’ In fact he was so angry at the referendum result that he gathered fans last year and took them on a cruise of the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament, where he’d hired two men with a van and a projector to beam the title of his new single, ‘Hope For The Underrated Youth’, on to the building. Wasn’t that a PR stunt? ‘Technically, it was an act of terrorism.’ Besides, punk has changed in this generation, he says. ‘It’s not about division. It’s about uniting people.’ And it’s all about the online. ‘Sid Vicious would be on Instagram,’ he adds.

There isn’t much that Yungblud seems afraid of, frankly. ‘In Russia we got death threats, like, “I’m going to f***ing cut your head off, faggot, for wearing a skirt.”’ When you’ve grown up in Doncaster wearing fishnets and dresses at public bus stops, you toughen up, he says. He describes himself as ‘more straight’ but ‘very fluid’. ‘Boxes are so irrelevant in terms of sexual identity,’ he clarifies. ‘A lot of people just feel how they feel.’

He has two younger sisters, his dad ran a guitar shop and his mum now runs a cake shop. He was scared to be himself, though, so at 15 he ran away to London (when I ask how he paid his way, he says his mum and dad supported his teenage exodus emotionally and financially). ‘I tried everything. In terms of sexuality, in terms of drugs, I liberated myself, rather dangerously to be honest — recklessly. I wanted to figure myself out so bad I didn’t care. I always say to young people, it was a distraction.’ He’s quit drugs now, he says, adding that they don’t pair well with his ADHD diagnosis. He’s made his peace with his beloved Doncaster. There’s nothing so cathartic as playing Leeds Festival and being told by friends that your old bullies are rocking out to you. ‘Which is funny,’ he adds, ‘because I remember when you used to take the piss out of me, put me in a locker for wearing eyeliner and call me Harry Styles.’

They were tearaway, formative years in London. His mum helped him find a house to lodge in for £75 a week in Hounslow, and he won a grant to ArtsEd, an independent performing arts school in Chiswick. That led to an acting gig in Disney’s musical TV drama The Lodge, set in a hotel in Northern Ireland, but ‘it kind of confused me, to be honest. I was in a plaid shirt, when two years before I was in a skirt and make-up. I was like, hang on a second, I’m in f***ing art school and I look like I work in Hollister.’

He struggled to express himself. ‘No one wanted to hear what we had to say,’ he recalls. ‘I met a manager who said: you’re a kid with f***ing make-up talking about politics — this will never get played on Radio 1.’ So he started playing pubs, river barges, anything. His bandmate, Adam, introduced him to a young Lewis Capaldi, who had just moved to London from Scotland. ‘We were teenagers going nowhere, sitting together in a flat all day. What do you do? You go to the pub five days a week.’ He and Capaldi hit it off and were flatmates for a while. ‘We just started getting pissed and going to Phil Taggart’s Slacker night in Old Street, or getting battered in the Electric down in Brixton.’ He posted a picture of the two of them kissing recently — just as mates, you understand. ‘He was an average snog. Best snog of the year is probably my guitar player. He’s a great kisser.’

He worked overtime building an audience. ‘I was on Instagram posting 20, 30 stories a day, doing six shoots a day, grabbing everything I could, because no one wanted to know.’ At one point he crashed an industry party in central London at 2am just to make a name for himself — and walked straight into Noel Gallagher. ‘He said, “What the f*** are you doing in here?” So I said, “I snuck in.”’ He introduced himself as Yungblud. ‘He said, “Never f***ing heard of you.” I said, “You will soon.” I’m good mates with his daughter Anaïs now, and she’s come on tour with us. And everyone thinks we’re shagging but we’re absolutely f***ing not.’

Then there’s Halsey, the Billboard chart-topping heartbreaker. ‘Well, we were together when we could be together. I think that’s why things ended. We have our own goals and ambitions. We weren’t ready to… be together all the time.’ He also hated Los Angeles, where she lived. ‘It wasn’t real there. I found it very suffocating.’ He doesn’t care who he falls in love with next — although he wants it to feel like a movie, he says. And he wants to be a post-label ambassador for the LGBTQ+ community. ‘I’ve been accused of queerbaiting. But I am absolutely not. I don’t tread the boards or tiptoe on eggshells for anyone. If I’m not going to tiptoe around what clothes or lipstick I wear, I’m not going to tiptoe around what’s politically correct.’

Yungblud is pumping a big heart. He called 15 fans a few days ago, who reached out to him via Facebook — a regular habit and a sign of how much the fan base means to him. He feels a lot. ‘There’s a loneliness embedded in me that’s just never going to go away,’ he says. He sees a therapist, and wants others to also. ‘I’m not Jesus, or Mother Theresa. Without the sheer weight of everyone pulling together I’m just a twat singing songs about politics in a pub.’ The kid? He’s alright.

Yungblud is touring the UK from 22 May. His new album is due in the summer (yungbludofficial.com)

If you are affected by the issues mentioned in this article, call Samaritans on 116 123

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