‘IT reeked of insecurity. I had to shut the doors for a bit’

As he returns with a stadium-sized sound, Yungblud opens up to Roisin O’Connor about his divisive image, record label pushback and why he has hit pause on his relationship

- Roisin O’Connor

Oh to be a fly on the wall of Yungblud’s record label when he played them his comeback single. They went white when they heard it,” the musician born Dominic Richard Harrison claims, grinning from ear to ear as he recalls the moment his team discovered the track was nine minutes and six seconds long. He’d found himself growing frustrated with vapid two-minute pop songs that pander to waning attention spans. So he decided to make something “without form”, pushing back against the idea of a “radio-friendly” track. The label team was, suffice to say, nervous. “They were like, ‘This is what you want to come back with? How the fuck are we gonna get this on Spotify?’” he says, with a squawk of laughter. “And I said, ‘I don’t fucking care.’ A nine-minute comeback song? Why the fuck not?”

“Hello Heaven Hello” marks a new chapter for the seemingly irrepressible artist; it opens on a burst of soaring, Ninetiesindebted pop-rock and, with a judder of electric guitar, shifts gears into a tremendous salvo of squalling solos, cinematic strings and thrashing drums, led by some sky-shattering vocals worthy of Steven Tyler or Axl Rose. Then, like the skies clearing after a thunderstorm, comes a bright acoustic riff and a reverbdrenched refrain that slowly fades out. “I was studying a lot of musical theatre for this album – West Side Story, Cabaret, all that – but also reading a lot about Lou Reed, Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin,” Harrison explains. It’s a notable departure from his previous work. He describes it as “kind of like a rock opera”, but beneath all the bombastis a newfound maturity in songwriting and production. Gone are the spiky guitars, jittery beats and Harrison’s slacker-style vocal delivery. Gone, too, are the onthe-nose lyrics, replaced with more subtle storytelling that allows his vulnerabilities to shine through.