Yungblud Really Really Really Swings Big on the Charmingly Overwrought ‘Idols’

Since emerging in the late 2010s, the British yelper Yungblud — a.k.a. Doncaster, England-born Dominic Harrison — has become an anti-pop hero. His songs channeled the angst and agitation of youth into frenetic mini-anthems that musically reflected the on-shuffle mentality of the 21^st century. Yungblud’s voice — a piercing yelp that exists somewhere between Gerard Way’s wail and Brian Molko’s sneer — slotted him in the alt-rock world, but his aspirations seemed to stretch far beyond that categorization.

With his fourth album Idols Yungblud harnesses those hopes and takes a very big swing. The 12 songs released this week are the first half of what he’s calling a double-album project, with part two slated for release at some point in the future, and this installment’s opening track “Hello Heaven, Hello” doubles as a leadoff statement of Yungblud’s revitalized ambition. Mutating from a dreamy greeting into a muscular, shape-shifting rock song before taking a hairpin turn into fuzz-shrouded acoustic balladry, the nine-minute cut finds Yungblud reintroducing himself to his audience with equal parts bravado and humility: “All the hopes and dreams I may have borrowed/Just know, my friend, I leave them all to you,” he wails near the song’s end before disappearing into a cloud of strings and feedback.   

Yungblud told Rolling Stone Australia that Idols comes “from [my] heart and not from [my] head… it came from within me, and I made this for me.” Its broad scope shows how deep his passion for taking music in unexpected directions can run. “Lovesick Lullaby” recalls the grungy, stompy power-alt-pop of the Nineties, with Yungblud sing-talking through a neurotic inner monologue on the verses before the candy-coated chorus opens up; the bridge brings forward some Brian Wilson-inspired vocal layering; and then everything comes back into the mix for chaos that’s as raucous as it is hooky. “The Greatest Parade” is defiantly downcast, its charging rhythms giving heightened importance to Yungblud’s withered yowl and world-weary lyrics  (“Now I think I’ve forgotten/Who I am/Well, can you remind me/Let’s write it in the sand”). “Ghosts” is another ambitious offering, pairing ruminations on mortality with stadium-rock grandeur, complete with an outro that possesses a churning splendor in a way that feels like a rebuke of any earthly limitations. (It’s one of a few cuts to feature the London Philharmonic, a nod to how much of a force Yungblud has become.)

Idols also shows how Yungblud’s bellow is tailor-made for cathartic ballads. “Zombie,” where he exposes his self-loathing (“Would you even want me, looking like a zombie?”) over midtempo riffing, and “War,” which tackles the conflicted feelings dredged up by the demands of stardom — particularly ones made by the people surrounding him whose motivations he can’t quite trust. On Idols, Yungblud doesn’t entirely ignore the hangers-on and “helpful” outsiders, but he does barrel past them with a hungry bravado that shows why so many have become passionate about his music.