In November, Dominic Harrison, better known as Yungblud, received three Grammy nominations. The news that he had become the first British artist in history to be nominated that many times in the awards’ rock categories came as a suitably striking finale to what, by any metric, was an extraordinary year for the 28-year-old singer-songwriter.
In June, his fourth studio album, Idols, entered the UK charts at No 1, outselling its nearest competitor by 50%. The same month, the annual festival he curates and headlines, Bludfest, drew an audience of 30,000 to The National Bowl in Milton Keynes. In July, he played at Back to the Beginning, the farewell performance by Black Sabbath, whose frontman Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days after the gig. On a bill almost comically overstuffed with heavy metal superstars paying tribute – Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Slayer – his rendition of Black Sabbath’s 1972 ballad Changes unexpectedly stole the show, appearing to win him an entirely new audience in the process: the crowd at the gig skewed considerably older than the gen Z fans Harrison traditionally attracts.
The ensuing performance is worth watching on YouTube. You can see Harrison winning the crowd over as the song progresses: by the end, there are audience members singing along in tears. “I wasn’t surprised in the least,” says Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who also performed that day. “And I say this without reservation, and as a fan of heavy metal for 50 years. Because Dom has one of the greatest voices in the history of music, and as grand as that may sound there is no hype in what I’m saying.”
It won 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 his “brother from another mother”, he enlisted him as a collaborator. Released in November, Aerosmith and Yungblud’s EP One More Time topped the UK charts and became Harrison’s first US Top 10 hit. “I’m sitting here at the end of the year talking to you, trying to comprehend it,” Harrison says. “What the fuck is going on?”
On a video call from Los Angeles, where he’s working on a new album, he is clearly delighted about his sudden ascent, partly because it seems so unlikely.
Harrison is no one’s idea of a critical cause celebre. Since the release of his eponymous 2018 debut EP, his work has consistently attracted reviews that range from middling to hostile. He has never had a solo hit single: his most successful, 2019’s 11 Minutes, stalled outside the Top 50. As he points out, beyond his famously rabid fanbase, who call themselves the Black Hearts Club, people may know the name Yungblud, but would struggle to name one of his songs. He says he only started Bludfest because no festivals would book him, confused as to where an artist whose oeuvre leaps around stylistically from rap to punk to pop to hard rock to indie would sit. “I wasn’t poppy enough for some of them, I wasn’t heavy enough for the rock festivals, so I had to start my own thing. And the festivals that weren’t giving me the slots I wanted cost so much, 200 to 500 quid a ticket, so we started selling tickets at 45 quid.”
He bullishly suggests that this year, 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 streaming song that Joe Bloggs in the pub knows” is a bonus, because “I’m never beholden to one song, I’m not defined by it the way some other artists are”. If the press look askance at his earnest pronouncements about politics, mental health, toxic masculinity and trans rights, his sartorial experiments with androgyny and his cartoonish punk image – all held to be evidence of someone trying a bit too hard – then that’s what he thinks his fans like about him: “I think it’s an innate sense of honesty, and a fearlessness to being laid bare. I’ve always been a lot for some people, but I’ve utterly told the truth in real-time through my music even if I’ve been lost doing it.”
He says his career has always played out in an improbable way, from the minute he left his home town of Doncaster for London (he briefly shared a flat with another would-be pop star, Lewis Capaldi). “No record label in the UK would touch me. I remember someone saying: ‘This music will never get played on Radio 1.’ I thought: ‘OK, I can’t rely on putting out music the old way, I can’t rely on good publicity and the press.’ I had to make videos on my phone instead and post them on social media: right, this is a song I’ve written called King Charles, it’s about Brexit.”
The online views started stacking up. “People started sending me direct messages and I started hitting them back: no one gave a shit in England, it was kids in the Netherlands. I put a gig on there and we sold out 150 tickets in 10 minutes. I remember turning up in a van and there were kids outside the venue when we pulled up. I loved the Clash and I’d seen pictures of Joe Strummer smoking outside gigs with his fans, so that’s what I did: I stood outside with them all day, bringing them cups of tea. That’s how it all started – all I focused on was the fans, meeting them. I didn’t think I was building a brand or a community or anything like that.”
But he clearly was: serendipitously, Harrison had embarked on his career at precisely the point where the influence of rock and pop’s traditional gatekeepers – the music press and radio – had begun to dramatically wane, and the kind of social media fuelled grassroots approach he’d been forced into had become all important. A US label, Geffen, took the bait, and by 2020, Harrison’s grassroots fanbase had grown to the point where his second album, Weird!, topped the UK charts. So did its eponymous successor, despite the fact that Harrison was so dissatisfied with it, he sank into depression after its release.
Along the way, he picked up some celebrity supporters, among them his “hero” Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, who appeared in the video for his single The Funeral. Nevertheless, Harrison says, he was “extremely nervous” when he was asked to perform at the Back to the Beginning show. For one thing, he’d assumed he would be playing an uptempo Black Sabbath track, not a ballad. For another, grizzled heavy metal fans are not known for their tolerance of pretty, young male pop stars, pal of the star attraction or not. “About 50,000 people were there,” he says. “Twenty-five thousand haven’t got a clue who I am, 15,000 think I’m a poser, and maybe 10,000, one of their kids has mentioned me to them.
“But the minute I got on stage, everything went calm. I grew up in a guitar shop [his father owned one], I’ve always been around older rock-heads – my dad, my uncles, the people who worked there and played in bands around Doncaster. It’s what I grew up with. I thought: ‘This is where I come from, this is going to bring me home.’”
Since then, the plaudits have continued to roll in. “I truly believe when all is said done, he will stand up there with the greats,” Corgan says. “And it’s worth noting that Ozzy believed this, too.” On Friday, Yungblud released a new version of his hit Zombie featuring the Smashing Pumpkins – the US band’s first ever collaborative release with another artist.
Harrison says he recently received an “amazing” letter from Robbie Williams, and his recent US tour attracted a much broader audience – “from kids to 70-year-olds”.
“It’s been such a beautiful year,” he says of 2025, understandably enthused about the future. “It’s limitless, and exciting.”
