Four hours or so before he’s due onstage at the Hollywood Palladium, Yungblud is bouncing around one of the venue’s dressing rooms with live-wire intensity to spare.
Tonight is the first date of a North American tour behind the British rock singer’s latest album, “Idols” — outside on Sunset Boulevard, a couple hundred fans are already lined up in the broiling late-August heat — and to mark the occasion someone has bestowed him with an overstuffed basket of treats from back home.
“Spotted dick — you know what that is?” he asks me as he rummages through the goodies. “Oh, and here’s a Curly Wurly.”
Down the hall, the members of Yungblud’s band are in a separate dressing room, chilling as an episode of “Top Gear” plays on a TV. Yet in here the singer is “buzzing,” as he puts it — too amped to relax even after having just flown in from a fairly sleepless stint in Japan.
“I’m just excited to get onstage and kick ass,” he says, which is pretty much what he goes on to do: Shirtless over a pair of black leather chaps, Yungblud gets the place roaring with a tuneful and proudly dramatic hard-rock sound that openly evokes the likes of Queen and Guns N’ Roses.
Not long into the show, he unfurls a homemade banner that reads “CONQUER AMERICA”; not long after that, he gives a little speech about the power of music, then belts a cover of “Changes” by Black Sabbath.
“I want you to f— look at the person next to you right now, and I want you to tell them that you f— love them,” he instructs the crowd, which happily obeys his order. “’Cause this is rock ’n’ roll, and it’s all about love.”
With a number of rock-world celebs in the house, including Glenn Danzig and the former GNR drummer Matt Sorum, Yungblud’s sold-out Palladium gig was something like the opening salvo of an aggressive stateside push by the 28-year-old Doncaster native, whose real name is Dominic Harrison.
In July, Yungblud went viral online with a show-stopping rendition of “Changes” at the Back to the Beginning festival in England, where Ozzy Osbourne reunited with the rest of Black Sabbath for a farewell performance just days before Osbourne’s death of a heart attack at age 76.
Yungblud was hardly an unknown when he teamed with Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt and Frank Bello of Anthrax to honor Osbourne with his tenderly anthemic power ballad; he’s been making records since he was a teenager pivoting away from an early start as a child actor.
But after years of dabbling in pop and hip-hop, Yungblud seemed to reintroduce himself with the widely praised “Changes” performance as an out-and-out rocker.
Now he’s doubling down on his alliance with the rock establishment with “One More Time,” a five-track EP due Nov. 21 that pairs him with the members of Aerosmith. “My Only Angel,” the EP’s lead single, is a snarling glam-blues stomp with intertwined vocals by Yungblud and Steven Tyler and a typically flashy guitar solo by Joe Perry.
For Yungblud, it’s all part of his mission to bring “theater and emotion and sequins” back to rock after what he views as a long stretch in which young artists seemed to turn away from old-fashioned showmanship.
“For years it’s been all about, ‘I don’t want to dress up — I’m gonna look like I came from my bedroom,’” he says backstage at the Palladium. “It’s almost like we’re coming out of grunge again and putting the diamonds back on.” He’s sitting on a brown leather couch, one leg tucked beneath him and the other jiggling with anticipatory energy; as we talk, the singer’s assistant enters the dressing room and hangs those leather chaps on a wardrobe rack.
“In America, rock stars pick one of two routes: pirate or cowboy,” Yungblud says. “I’m picking cowboy.”
Rock-world celebs including Glenn Danzig and Matt Sorum caught Yungblud’s show at the Hollywood Palladium.
(Hon Wing Chiu / For The Times)
The collaboration with Aerosmith — and before that with Osbourne, who all but passed the baton to Yungblud in a poignant behind-the-scenes video from Back to the Beginning — is clearly his attempt to bridge rock’s generation gap: the chasm he sees between young people who regard the classics as the music of their parents and older people who think all the youngsters do is rip off what came before.
Back to the Beginning, in particular, was “the first time in years that generations of rock musicians came together under the same bill without any kind of hostility or negativity,” Yungblud reckons. “Everyone embraced each other.” (Anyone who’s seen Oasis’ blockbuster reunion tour — a nightly gathering of bucket-hat-wearing men of various ages — might say the phenomenon is spreading.)
Yet that blending of eras also happens on “Idols,” which sets very Gen Z thoughts about trauma, gender and identity against elaborate arrangements with a scope and ambition borrowed from the days of the LP. After he recorded the album, Yungblud even invited a camera crew to document a live performance of the music at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where U2 and David Bowie famously worked, for a black-and-white concert film, “Are You Ready, Boy?”
There’s a scene in the movie where you’re struggling to hit the high note in your song “The Greatest Parade.” You tell the director there’s no way you’re gonna dub it later — that that’s for pop stars. Delineate the difference between pop and rock for me.
Pop stardom isn’t always rooted in truth. Everything’s slick, everything’s perfect — it’s the ideal, right? Whereas rock music is full of mistakes. It’s full of ill voices, and it’s sweaty and smells a bit. It’s rooted in: I’m gonna get it in this room even if it hurts me.
As someone deeply invested in a certain rock lineage — but who writes with a grasp of the emotional jargon of our time — are you glad to be living in an age of therapy-speak? Or do you wish you’d been around back when nobody talked about their feelings?
With art at the moment, it’s so specific that sometimes it cringes me out. [Sings] “I am depressed today” — it lacks poetry. What was cool in the ’70s is that if you weren’t necessarily allowed to talk about it, you’d find an interesting way to demonstrate the idea. You’re Lou Reed and you want to sing about wanting to f— everything — well, they’re not gonna broadcast that on the radio, so you have to do it more poetically.
Your song “Zombie” was inspired by your grandmother’s experience with alcoholism. How has your relationship with drugs and booze changed over the past four or five years?
I’ve never really been into drugs. I’ve got ADHD, and drugs kind of send me the other way — make me sleepy. I don’t want to be numb, I want to feel everything. Booze — I’m British, so I love it. But I’d say with this album, I kind of cleaned it up a little bit. I lost a lot of weight. Growing up in the public eye is a very weird thing — you have no control over any narrative on the internet. So I’d turn to alcohol or food for a sense of control. But then I started boxing a lot, and you can’t be hungover when you’re sparring with someone or you’re gonna get knocked out.
Who shaped your ideas about sex appeal in a rock ’n’ roll context?
Michael Hutchence. Axl Rose. Bowie in Berlin.
When you were a kid and you saw images of those artists —
I was mesmerized. I was like, these guys just look like superheroes to me. I was obsessed.
You ride a horse through a snowy landscape in the music video for “Hello Heaven, Hello.” Did you know how to ride a horse before that?
No, though I’d been on a horse before.
You look good on it.
You know what’s interesting? My mum’s father’s a gypsy — full-on rode horses and wagons and s—. So I used to get on as a kid and just slap the horse’s arse and see what happened. For the video I had two days’ preparation, and the guy said it was in my blood.
I enjoyed your fur-lined robe.
I put that on because it was f— minus 15.
Where were you shooting?
Bulgaria, which was cool. I’d recommend going, honestly — beautiful country. This Bulgarian man says to me, “If you put a layer of Vaseline on, it gives you a minute before you feel the cold.” So I’d slather it on, put on the coat and then do a take. It’s a layer of blubber, innit? Like I was a f— Thanksgiving turkey.
When Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine invited Yungblud to take part in Back to the Beginning, the singer expected Morello to ask him to prepare something noisy and jagged like Black Sabbath’s “The Wizard.”
“They’re gonna want my crazy energy,” he remembers thinking. Instead, Morello told him that Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, had requested he do “Changes.” “I was like, F—,” he recalls with a laugh. “But also: All right — this is a moment where I can show the world that I can sing.”
Indeed, the result had a bit of Freddie Mercury-at-Live Aid to it, not least when Yungblud — onstage in full daylight — led the crowd of tens of thousands in a final a cappella chorus he says was unplanned.
“It was kind of like shagging,” he says. “I’d climaxed, but I’m like, How do I prolong this for them?”
Yungblud says he was originally supposed to sing “Changes” as a duet with Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst but that Durst had to pull out of the festival after a family emergency.
“Can you imagine if he’d done it with me?” he asks. “Fred Durst’s a legend, but it would have been a completely different story. It’s like the universe gave me a day to make two years’ headway in my career.”
Yungblud grew up immersed in rock music thanks to the guitar shop his family owned in Doncaster. In 2016 he appeared as an actor in a Disney Channel series called “The Lodge”; his debut album as Yungblud came out two years later. He went on to collaborate with a broad array of singers, rappers and DJs — Halsey, Marshmello, Avril Lavigne, Lil Yachty — but by 2022’s self-titled LP he was feeling “lost,” he says, amid the pressures of a music industry that “always wanted me to twist what I was doing a little bit because rock had been asleep for a long time.”
Yungblud is scheduled to tour the U.S. again in 2026.
(Hon Wing Chiu / For The Times)
These days he doesn’t perform many of the songs from the synthed-up “Yungblud” on tour, nor does he expect to in the future.
“But that was what that album was meant to be,” he says. “It pushed me to the place where I was like, I’m gonna make something that I want — something centered in rock — and if people don’t like it, I’ll just stop.”
Impersonating a record executive, he recounts a conversation he says he had before “Idols”: “‘What if we just turn the guitars down a bit?’ F— off. This is it, or you can drop me.”
Asked to corroborate, Capitol Music Group Chairman and CEO Tom March laughs. “I love Dom,” he says. “And that is his energy.”
A few weeks after the Palladium gig, Yungblud checks in from London on a video call. He’s just returned from his tour on our side of the pond and declares it to have been a total success on multiple fronts.
“American girls are crazy,” he says. “I’ve been reminded that I’m a prude of an English boy.”
According to Yungblud, the EP with Aerosmith grew out of a complimentary email he received from Perry after “Idols” came out. The guitarist had suggested they meet up in L.A. to talk, “and I booked a studio just in case we wanted to get frisky,” Yungblud says. Within an hour, he, Perry and Tyler had started writing “My Only Angel.”
Yungblud, from left, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry perform during September’s MTV Video Music Awards.
(Arturo Holmes / Getty Images for MTV)
For Aerosmith, which last year said it was retiring from the road due to damage to Tyler’s voice, the collaboration is obviously a way to get back in front of younger rock fans. (Tyler has been accused of sexual assault by two women who say he abused them in the 1970s. He denies the accusations, and last year a judge dismissed one of the women’s lawsuits; the other is set to go to trial in May 2026.)
For Yungblud, the EP provides him with “music that sounds like I can play it when I’m 70,” he says. “The coolest thing about writing with someone who’s 76 is they don’t give a f— about innovation. They care about: Does this song make me feel something?”
Next spring, Yungblud will bring the tunes from “One More Time” and from “Idols” back to the U.S. for another tour as part of his continued effort to win over the country he’s always cherished as the birthplace of rock.
“America is fascinating and exotic and amazing and grandioso,” he says. “The cowboys in the desert and Mt. Rushmore and being on the road with the gas stations and the eight-hour drives — it’s like a dream. I love it.”
Come on — nobody loves a gas station during an eight-hour drive.
“Slim f— Jims?” he exclaims. “I’m telling you, I honestly do.”
Yungblud on Ozzy, Aerosmith and bringing sequins back to rock
