Yungblud, standard-bearer of pop-punk

The British rocker turns 27 today Young blue. There are three albums released so far by Dominique Richard Harrisonthis is the name reported at the Doncaster registry office where the boy was born: “21st Century Liability” (2018), “Weird!” (2020) and “Yungblud” (2022). In the following lines you can read our review of his latest album released in September two years ago.

Come to think of it, Yungblud is an Achille Lauro who managed to bring back into fashion the pop punk sounds of the late ’90s and early 2000s, creating, together with a few colleagues – Machine Gun Kelly above all – an international trend that, among other things, contributed to making a movement and its protagonists too quickly forgotten a cult (pushing live entertainment giants like Live Nation to even set up nostalgic festivals like When We Were Young, which at the end of October will bring together Avril Lavigne, Paramore, My Chemical Romance and Alkaline Trio, among others, in Las Vegas).

This “Yungblud” is the third studio album by Dominic Richard Harrison – this is the real name of the British artist, born in 1997 – but in fact it is as if it were an awaited debut: it is the first that the singer has released since the spotlight has been on him outside the United Kingdom, where his “Weird!” already topped the charts in 2020.

Mick Jagger called him “the future of rock” (even making Damiano David of Maneskin angry, excluded from the Rolling Stones frontman’s list of the most promising new generation rock singers, in which Jagger instead included Machine Gun Kelly). Ozzy Osbourne agreed to participate in the video for “The funeral” (in which, making fun of purists and conservatives, he plays a Yungblud hater and tries to kill him). Robert Smith of The Cure allowed him to use a sample of “Close to me” in “Tissues”, among the twelve songs on the album. Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters has been a fan since day one. Introducing him on stage at the MTV European Music Awards, he said back in 2020: “This is why I think rock and roll is not dead”. The three billion streams that Yungblud’s songs have had on platforms to date contribute to making expectations for the album very high, in which the British artist expertly mixes alternative sounds with ultra-pop melodies.

Yungblud worked on the album together with Dylan Brady (American musician and producer who is the ideal half of the experimental electronic music duo 100 Gecs and who outside of that project has also worked with, among others, Charli XCX) and Matt Schwartz (already in the studio with Massive Attack, Kylie Minogue and, in the alternative field, Bullet for My Valentine).

What is vaguely punk, beyond a few big guitars here and there, is mostly the imagery that Yungblud plays with, often singing about that past made up of accidents along the way and traumas that he left behind (he said he attempted suicide a couple of times and alludes to the subject in “The funeral”: “And I hate myself that’s alright that I dream about the day I die”, he sings). All the clichés of the genre are there in the lyrics. Starting with drugs: in “Cruel kids” he talks about having taken so many substances that he couldn’t stand up straight, while for “Sweet heroine” the title itself speaks for itself. Helping him create potential chart-topping hits were hitmakers of international pop fame: among the authors of “Cruel Kids”, rejected from who knows where, is Dan Smith of Bastille (remember? In 2013 they hit the jackpot with “Pompeii”), in “Mad” there is the hand of Jonas Jeberg (Selena Gomez, Nicki Minaj, Fifth Harmony), in “The boy in the black dress” that of Ido (which gave hits to Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Chainsmokers, Camila Cabello).

Never mind if in many passages, more than an aspiring punk rocker, it seems like listening to a boy band from MTV New Generation (“Don’t feel like feeling sad today”). The album flows and does its job. Was it fair to expect a little more courage and audacity? Definitely yes. Maybe he will make up for it with the concerts of the world tour, which will stop in Italy on March 10, 2023 at the Mediolanum Forum in Assago, Milan.