Dominic “Yungblud” Harrison offers a very good interview. He talks passionately about hot-button points: gender fluidity, transgender rights, psychological well being. He peppers his dialog with attention-grabbing, self-aggrandising soundbites: “I’m all the pieces that individuals hate.” “I’m extra of a preacher than I'm a musician.” “I'm a automobile for different folks’s expression.” He admonishes “BBC Radio 6 Music dads” and hymns his followers as “a military based mostly on a basis of fact and want and trauma”. Amongst his most hanging pronouncements was one thing he stated to the Guardian in 2020: “If you understand Yungblud” – Harrison has a behavior of referring to his onstage persona within the third individual – “the music is secondary.”
It was a remark that Harrison’s detractors, whose quantity and vociferousness is probably an unavoidable consequence of claiming issues comparable to: “I’m extra of a preacher than I'm a musician” every time a journalist is in earshot, leapt on with relish. Previously an actor in Disney teen drama The Lodge, Harrison has lengthy been dogged by questions on his legitimacy as an avatar of punky rebel. However you would take it as a frank evaluation of pop success in an age wherein social media engagement is deemed of paramount significance, or an admission that his followers, who name themselves the Black Hearts Membership, are as interested in him due to how he seems and what he says as a lot as how he sounds – which, as an evaluation of how pop fandom works, appears honest sufficient.
Or you would take it as an sincere disclosure that music is the least well-formed facet of what Harrison does. Actually, his strategy has swerved about over the past 4 years. His first mixtape, twenty first Century Legal responsibility, proposed him as a type of Ed Sheeran in eyeliner, providing a extra angsty, Yorkshire-accented tackle the previous acoustic guitar with hip-hop-influenced beats and vocal supply. His follow-up album Bizarre! appeared linked to the pop-punk revival. And so as to add to the 00s throwback really feel, a touch of Britpop 2.0’s much less lauded practitioners – the Fratellis and the Computerized – often lurked round its contents.
Bizarre! entered the charts at No 1 however fell out of the High 30 the next week: a useless giveaway of an artist with a sizeable and dedicated fanbase however little wider enchantment. You get the sensation that may be a scenario Harrison is eager to rectify on his eponymous follow-up. The distorted guitars nonetheless chug alongside however they’re aligned to choruses constructed to fill the arenas Harrison is scheduled to play subsequent yr – and certainly to be heard past their confines – in addition to synth hooks and clipped new wave beats that bear the affect of the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights. The bratty, nasal sneer of Harrison’s vocals – very a lot an acquired style – has been toned down barely, as has his accent: he often lets fly with one thing audibly rooted in South Yorkshire, as on Don’t Really feel Like Feeling Unhappy At present, however extra typically it pitches itself in direction of the center of the Atlantic.
Leaving apart the truth that in the event you supply a extra pop-facing tackle pop-punk you’re inevitably going to sound like Busted in some unspecified time in the future – and you may undoubtedly think about the 00s boyband gurning their method by The Funeral – a lot of the music is very well completed. If the shift into closely Auto-Tuned vocals and electronics on I Cry 2 feels a step too far – there actually is an terrible lot of that type of factor about for the time being, and also you ponder whether we'd like any extra of it, vociferous defence of Harrison’s pan-sexuality within the lyrics or not – even a BBC Radio 6 Music dad may be compelled to concede that Tissues or Reminiscences (the latter boasting a visitor vocal from Willow Smith) signify bulletproof items of pop songwriting.
However it's curious how a lot the lyrics – that are central to Yungblud’s outsider enchantment – veer, qualitatively. Harrison can write potent and witty strains: “Masculinity appears to harm quite a bit the primary time you're feeling it in your jaw” is a handy guide a rough solution to describe being punched. “Artwork is useless, killed by data” is an equally snappy, if bleak, evaluation of social media’s impact on well-liked tradition. However he’s additionally able to dishing up stuff that’s teen-poetry trite: he’s completely labored out that “heroin” and “heroine” sound the identical, whereas Don’t Really feel Like Feeling Unhappy At present finds him asking: “why are we sitting in silence, questioning how we are able to beat all of the violence?”Typically he’s genuinely affecting – as on Intercourse Not Violence’s exploration of gender – and generally he’s clumsy to the purpose that you end up begging his pardon: are you able to present indicators of weak point asymptomatically?
Maybe that’s a part of the enchantment to his “children”: in an period once we’re instructed #relatability trumps all the pieces, possibly they need to hear stuff that sounds prefer it may have been ripped from their very own non-public journals, howlers and all. Or maybe it’s a sign that – for all his bullishness in interviews, and his newest album’s assured sonic step ahead – Yungblud remains to be very a lot a piece in progress.
This week Alexis listened to
Yazelles – Sugar Low
Presently to be discovered on SoundCloud: horns, sirens, ragga vocal samples – peak-time, edge-of-panic home music.
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