Yungblud Confronts His Insecurities on ‘Idols': This ‘Was Almost My Last Chance'

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6 days ago

Yungblud initially tried to make Idols right after his album 2020 Weird! hit Number One — but it didn't come together at the time. Instead, he ended up working on Yungblud, his self-titled record from 2022 that, in his view, came together partially by 'letting too many opinions in.'
'I was always discouraged from making [Idols] because Weird was so commercially successful,' he tells Rolling Stone. 'Everyone was like, 'No, we need to keep the momentum going.' When Yungblud came out, I stood on top of a hotel room in New York and I went, 'Fuck, I've repeated myself.' I almost made an album with the poster boy of what people said Yungblud was.'
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After some much-needed self-reflection, he finally completed Idols, out Friday, at a 'really pivotal time' in his life. 'I really asked myself, 'Am I fucking happy?'' he recalls. 'I was falling into a cycle of giving a fuck what people thought.'
Idols is his attempt at making 'something classic,' not a record you'll overplay and then move on from but something you'll 'put on once a week for the rest of your life.' It pushes his sound into new sonic territory and introduces a more mature Yungblud who looks inward.
'If it sounded like the past, I failed. Fuck that. There are so many pastiche rock bands out there. That's why rock's been dead for so long,' he says. 'I didn't want to adhere to a time period… If it felt too specific to this moment, then I failed. And it would cringe me out.'
As a young artist, he says, 'you want to be the photograph on the wall,' pointing to icons like Freddie Mercury and Mick Jagger. The album, instead, reflects a journey of self-fulfillment and the realization that 'we never give ourselves enough credit for our own individuality.'
'This album was almost like my last chance,' he says. 'If I hadn't been sure of what I was making, I don't think there would've been a way back for me. I made a fucking incredible album when I was 19 — 21st Century Liability. I got so much bigger than I ever expected to get. And then the mainstream finds you and you become insecure about things you didn't know existed.'
The cover is intentionally 'statementless,' showing Yungblud in a submissive pose, with his body pulling away from title Idols. 'I've been too wounded by this shit. I don't want to be up front and center anymore, for the time being,' he says. 'I want to get out of the line of fire, I want protect myself.'
From London, Yungblud breaks down five songs from his new album Idols
I was listening to a lot of theater and a lot opera. If you look at Zeppelin, the Who, the Rolling Stones, it is all derivative from Bach and Vivaldi and Chopin but on electric guitars. If you listen to Zepplin melodies, it's classical music and John Bonham's drumming is classic percussive shit mixed with the blues, but from a perspective of theater that tell a story through music. In the video, I start with 'hello, is there anyone there?' and it goes through this journey of self-discovery and one step into heaven and a reclamation — but first you have to go through all this bullshit… and I arrive at the end of the mountain. I'm not questioning shit. It's very religious, but in discovery and a search for meaning.
This album is about the idea of idolism, and this song came from me facing people leaving the fanbase. If you know Yungblud, it's a tight community, and I would see people almost outgrow it. I really wrote this as a love letter to my fanbase. And people who have left been like, you were once a part of the greatest parade, and you can go, you can come, but I will think of you. I will dream of you, I will do this for you every day until I am not here anymore. It was a really gutting song. It's about how we lift something up onto a pedestal and rip it down and then lift it up and rip down again because it's entertainment. We like to build fairy tales to enhance our own lives. I looked at what everyone had to say. 'I can't like Yungblud anymore, I'm not 17.' It's interesting because I hadn't grown. That's why I needed space. I needed to fucking grow. I stagnated in time. I'm frozen in a statue of what I as for the first iteration of my career. I just started getting singing lessons to hit those notes at the end.
If I didn't call the album Idols, I would call it Change, because it's been the biggest transition point as a human being in my life. I remember writing this song at nighttime, about 2 a.m. The song came out, and I remember just crying my fucking eyes out to my producer Mati Schwartz, We were having a conversation about how every point in my life, when I feel happy about how I feel in my head, everything fucking changes again. Why does someone die? Why do I have to leave my house? Why do I fall out of love? Why does everything change? I learned through this song that there is beauty in the uncomfortable and that there's something to learn more than ever in the uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable you can be, the harder you feel anything. At the time, I wreaked of insecurity, because I took people saying, 'Your music's shit.' All I had cared about was the one guy in the fucking pub who believes I'm inauthentic, and it was dimming my light. I was allowing these people to make me quieter, to make me more insecure, to make me more hesitant… On the song, I was talking to a 19-year-old, going like, you ain't fucking ready for this shit. And 'Why, at 26, are you so confused and insecure? You get to do what you love,' and by the end of the song I check my fucking chest, and I go, 'Does that look like a good shot? You missed.' I'm still here. I'm still around, and I got my spunk and bite back.
Fuck, I love this song. I was walking down the banks of the River Thames in London, and I was wondering: how many people have walked where I have walked? How many ghosts have walked where I have walked? It was this image of ghosts passing me, or someone in 20 years or 100 years passing me. 'Choose life and don't forget to live. Don't forget to feel the air on your face. Don't forget to fucking enjoy every experience you feel.' It's really cool to be alive — it's confusing and it hurts, but it's a beautiful thing. I wanted to stay there in London forever. It's the point in the album where I start to win as the protagonist. I'm gonna get through it.
The end is a three-and-a-half-minute outro inspired by The King and I… the music had this waltzing, temptress thing. I wanted to make stadium rock [at the end of 'Ghosts,'] so I said fuck it — I put all my mates in the studio, and I wanted to [imagine] Wembley Stadium, River Plate Stadium. I wanna get something that's gonna make people move, and then it's gonna build musically. It's an insane rock outro to get a stadium shaking. I want to envision that stadium with me when you have your headphones in. When you are in a room full of 25,000 people outdoors, and you're all there for a mutual reason, I have never felt calmer — even if the music is sporadic and mental. I felt calm. That's why we did that with the outro.
Part two is the dark and downward spiral to the inevitable realization that I'm not going to be here forever. Mortality. So when you find yourself, when you love yourself… Who are you going to share that with? Part two talks about my mother, it talks about my family, it talks about the love of my life that I broke up with in pursuit of myself. Part two is almost contradictory to part one's idea.
This is a massive moment for me because this is the first song I've ever put on an album that I didn't write. Mati had written this song for me seven years ago when he met me. And he saw me starting to take off, and he knew. It's probably been the most understanding thing about myself I've ever read, and I didn't even write it. It made me fucking cry my eyes out because no one has ever understood me more in my entire life. When you make art from your soul or your heart, it can never be intellectualized, because it pours from that thing—you don't know why it's there, what makes you feel. It's yours. He basically just said to me, 'All you are is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a product of your temptation. You live in your imagination… All you are is the self-filling odyssey. Tell me what inspired you lately, and maybe I'll remember you vaguely.' Everyone's always asked me, 'Who are you, what are you?' And always my answer to them is, 'When?' Instead of being afraid of the change, I've embraced it and used it as inspiration. It was mental that he wrote that. On this album, I had to alleviate my ego. It was more of an artistic statement to include it, and I don't want to change anything about it. The song was perfect as it was written.
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