Surprise! YUNGBLUD is about to drop Idols II. We joined Britain’s newest icon in LA, where he told us about “writing a funeral song for myself”, arguing with Billy Corgan about the best Bowie album, and the artistic search for “that humane, simple sh*t that allows you to feel lucky to be alive…”
“It’s all fucking bollocks,” blurts YUNGBLUD with a shake of the head.
It’s a statement we’d find a little easier to swallow if he wasn’t presently in a chauffeur-driven car en route to lunch at Soho House in West Hollywood. Or the fact he’ll later head to the studio to begin his new album with one of the industry’s most sought-after producers, Andrew Watt, who’s worked with Ozzy, Iggy Pop, The Rolling Stones and Post Malone.
Oh, and to be clear, this isn’t the follow-up to last year’s Idols – that record, Idols II, is due for release on Friday (February 20), of which more later – tonight he’ll be kicking off the one after that. In short: the man also known as Dom Harrison is one busy boy.
The 28-year-old is therefore trying to maintain a sense of perspective as he navigates the whirlwind of success he’s currently in – the kind of achievements that necessitate conducting hour-long conversations with K! as he heads to an exclusive members’ club and, upon arrival, in the car park (we’ve left our membership card at home, sadly).
Thankfully, maintaining a clear idea of what’s important is easy because the operation around Dom has been in place from day one.
“I’ve only ever done this with my mates, a tight-knit team that have been with me since I was 16 years old,” he explains, running hands adorned with massive silver rings through his inky black hair. “That means I can focus on my fanbase and my music. Everything else, like hate and love on the internet, is just fucking noise.”
Admittedly, ignoring being labelled both a cynical marketing ploy incarnate and rock’s second coming is easier when you’ve just won a GRAMMY. YUNGBLUD recently triumphed in the Best Rock Performance Category at the 68th annual awards – beating Linkin Park, Turnstile and Hayley Williams – for his storming version of Changes at Black Sabbath’s Back To The Beginning concert on July 5, 2025.
“We won for something that was live, unfiltered and unpolished,” says Dom of the performance alongside Extreme/Rihanna guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello, keyboardist Adam Wakeman and Sleep Token drummer II. “It was a moment. We couldn’t go in and re-dub or fix the guitar solo, all that shit that gets done today. It could have gone incredibly wrong, or could have gone to the fucking stars…
“Thank fuck it was the latter.”
Combined with his two other nominations on the night – for Best Rock Song (Zombie) and Best Rock Album (Idols) – Dom recently entered the record books as the first British artist to earn three GRAMMY nods in rock categories in a single year. Regardless of this accomplishment, it’s the recognition of his contemporaries that made his win special.
“It’s voted for by musicians and your peers,” he enthuses. “The committee isn’t fucking record companies and which one of their artists has spent the most money and should get the most visibility. It’s all about producers, songwriters, singers, players, so it’s really special because the likes of Tom Morello, Dave Grohl and Hayley Williams are on the committee – I’m on it – and you vote for what you think is the best music of the year.”
In the midst of all this, and the constant name-drops that clang like falling cutlery, it’s heartening to remember Dom is a kid from Doncaster who grew up in his dad’s guitar shop, dreaming of moments like this and slowly but surely making them happen. He considered Ozzy Osbourne his “North Star” and ended up becoming his friend, delivering a grandstanding version of one of his songs in front of a global audience, before dedicating his GRAMMY to The Prince Of Darkness following his death last July, accompanied on the night by Sharon and Kelly Osbourne.
And yet, rather than seeing this for the incredible story it is, the stuff of Hollywood that’s a little on the far-fetched side, some still won’t give YUNGBLUD his dues – continuing to view him as a gurning opportunist standing on the shoulders of giants.
“It’s so funny when people don’t understand me,” he says of the naysayers with a shrug. “People forget that every fucking rock star started out as a fan – probably the biggest music fans in the world. All I talked about with Ozzy, all I talk about with Steven Tyler [from Aerosmith, with whom YUNGBLUD made last year’s collaborative One More Time EP], all I talk about with Billy Corgan or Dr. Dre is fucking music. Just in the same way that people do down the pub on a Saturday night, we’re fighting like fucking cats and dogs about the greatest Bowie album or the best Beatle.”
For those interested, it’s a tie between Heroes and Scary Monsters… for Dom’s choice of Bowie record, while John Lennon is his preference from The Fab Four.
The thing those who bristle against YUNGBLUD won’t know is that Dominic Richard Harrison is exactly the man he presents himself as. There is seemingly no difference between the performer you see gyrating shirtless onstage, or captured on social media being mobbed by 3,000 fans as he lands in Mumbai, or cavorting starkers on a yacht on TMZ, and the guy we’re speaking to now. This isn’t an act he steps in and out of – he’s always been like this, and he’s always had his detractors as a result.
“At school, I was a write-off and some people thought the same about me then the same as they do now – that I was too loud, that I’m faking it, that I try too hard,” he reveals. “It was Ozzy’s example and music that gave me an ounce of hope back then, and he’s still the person I lean on whenever I have to walk a red carpet, because I find them weird and intimidating. I put on [Ozzy song] Flying High Again, the version from [1993 live album] Live & Loud, and it still makes me feel better every single time. I hear the drums come in, Mike Inez playing that bassline and Ozzy shouting, ‘Come on, fuckers,’ and I think, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’”
“At school people thought I was too loud, that I’m faking it, that I try too hard”
Idols II – not ‘Part II’, as, confusingly, that’s the name of a track on Idols I – is a sequel that may come as a surprise to some, though it shouldn’t. It was always supposed to be a double-album in two parts, and while Dom suggests this second instalment is more raw and less grandiose than its predecessor, they’re similar enough to be considered as a single, elongated body of work. Indeed, their author views them as one album. Conceptually, however, they are distinctly different.
“Idols is a journey, a train of thought that unfolds over every line, every bar,” explains Dom. “And it takes you to the top of a mountain of self-reclamation, getting back to myself from the darkest I’ve ever felt in my life – the most unworthy, the most judged – and finding my strength. Idols II is more about mortality, about feeling the air on your face, how to love your girlfriend and feel lucky to have both your parents – that humane, simple shit that allows you to feel lucky to be alive.”
Last month, you’ll recall, YUNGBLUD released a new version of Zombie featuring The Smashing Pumpkins, led by his pal Billy Corgan, whom Dom calls “one of the most talented visionaries in rock music, but one of the most cynical bastards ever”.
Rather than providing further evidence of Dom’s burgeoning contacts book, though, this “earthy” and “fucking gravel” reinterpretation of Zombie, the track that originally appeared on Idols, signifies this follow-up’s focal shift away from Dom’s life towards the things affecting us all.
“Idols II is asking: how the fuck do we live in the world with each other? The world’s fucking mental right now and everyone’s walking on eggshells, thinking that if we disagree with each other then we can’t be friends. Why?”
This message is so important to Dom, in fact, that at one point he considered Idols II not featuring his face on the cover.
“I want to make it more about the music and what it’s saying, even though it feels very un-modern to do that and it might be a detriment to the art. I didn’t want to go and make indulgent videos around this music. I wanted it to be a little bit more artistic.”
If this makes Idols II sound overly po-faced, then we’re happy to report that’s entirely not the case. While there are moments of seriousness, such as the opening track I Need You (To Make The World Seem Fine), which wears the influence of Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond incredibly nakedly, elsewhere there’s levity to be found. Postman has a swagger reminiscent of Oasis, who, it’s rumoured, are in the running to record the song for the next James Bond film. Not if YUNGBLUD gets there first, though.
“I would fucking love to,” Dom booms at the prospect. “For any British artist, a Bond song is the goal and in the same league as headlining Glastonbury. I’d be down for a collaboration on a Bond song if Liam and Noel would fucking have me.”
And why not? The Gallagher brothers are not so different from YUNGBLUD. They, like Dom, started out with a dream to emulate their heroes paired with the same human feeling we all have, whether you ply your trade on a stage or in an office, a cafe or a tattoo parlour, as Postman declares: ‘Everybody wants to be loved / Everybody wants to be adored.’
This desire is made more complicated when social media forces us to all be in competition with one another – to be richer, more successful, in better shape – thereby leaving us with the feeling that we’re all falling short. It’s a notion explored on Idol II’s standout moment, the similarly Britpop inspired closing track Suburban Requiem and the lyric, ‘Everybody knows they’re special until they look around.’
“We all get fucking tripped out because we’re all living in our own movie,” Dom elaborates as his car snakes through the Hollywood Hills, home to many of the film industry’s biggest players. “What’s in our head is bigger than the reality of life, and you need to remember we’re human. Every time I meet one of my heroes I think, ‘They took a shit this morning just like I did,’ which lets me level with them, no matter how much I look up to them or what they’ve done for me.
“The reason the song’s called Suburban Requiem is because I’m almost writing a funeral song for myself, realising that we shouldn’t let anxiety waste 80 per cent of our day. It’s not fucking real. Me taking a drink of water and talking to you now, that’s a real, tangible thing. We waste so much time in our heads we forget to live.” He flexes his arm in our direction, reminding us of the tattoo visible on the cover art for Idols, the words ‘Don’t forget to live’ on his right shoulder.
This is easier said than done, of course, especially when your life is a treadmill with the speed setting set all the way up, which Dom seems to acknowledge on I Need You with the words: ‘To be a part of the picture, you’ve got to keep with the pace.’ While Dom suggests the song is an opportunity to check in with the listener on this journey, it’s evidently him catching up with his younger self, too, recalling the days when he looked to the posters on his walls and wanted the heroes staring down at him to guide him in what to do (‘I need you to make the world seem fine’).
“I looked at the photographs on the wall and I wanted to be one of the photographs,” he explains. “But I realise that the people I looked at growing up – David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Ozzy Osbourne – I never knew them, so every answer I got from looking at those photos actually came from within me. We all give credit to these other people, from the traits from our parents to the aspirations from our role models, but so much comes from within us.”
It’s an important realisation considering YUNGBLUD is sure to be the photograph on many young people’s walls now, the idol they look to for the answers to overcoming their challenges and getting to where he is.
“What the fuck am I gonna do?” he says of the responsibility, though he already knows the answer: looking to the same heroes he always has, while throwing some of his own wisdom into the mix.
Just how does YUNGBLUD remain so indefatigably positive in the face of success and scrutiny, devotion and derision? Surely he gets jaded on occasion? The answer, earnest though it might sound, is that he doesn’t make it all about him and never has. It’s certainly not a sentiment you hear from a rock frontman very often.
“I think what happens with any performer who trips up, who really fails, is that they make it about themself,” explains Dom, thanking his driver as he arrives at his destination. “I think I’m lucky – I’m still here and I’m still alive and still close to my fanbase because every night when I go onstage, I get to watch a show too. The more you make it about you, the shitter the performer you are. This isn’t about you. You are only a catalyst of energy to bring 20,000 together as one. That’s when you’re the best. That’s when you’re Freddie Mercury, [late INXS frontman] Michael Hutchence, Axl Rose. But if you make it about you, that’s when you become a wanker.”
And with that, he stubs out his cigarette and prepares himself for his lunch date, but not before returning to a theme he touched upon earlier: that we all want to be loved.
“That’s how I get over some fucker leaving a naive comment online,” says Dom, brushing ash from the lapel of his black waistcoat, the same way he does his haters, because he knows why they are the way they are. “I have people saying that I had everything handed to me, or that I’m an industry plant. All those people fucking want is love and validation, and they’re not getting it, so they take it out on me, or they take it out on a young rock band starting out, or a fucking pop star whose music they think is shit. To me, it’s funny – those people just need a hug.”
The funniest bit? Despite being a target for their bitterness, YUNGBLUD would give them that hug.
Idols II is released digitally this Friday, February 20 via Island Records/Locomotion.
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