Yungblud isn’t one for subtleties. Armed with his trademark smudged eyeliner and creeper shoes, Doncaster, England’s Dominic Harrison uses formulaic pop melodies to proclaim the misfit manifesto: Nobody understands me. In the music video for “The Funeral,” the opener to Harrison’s third album, Yungblud, he digs his own grave and crowd surfs in a coffin before Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne run him over with their car. “Just some fucking poser,” Sharon scoffs, signaling to Yungblud’s purist naysayers that he’s in on the joke, too.
Over the past four years, Harrison has become something of a Gen Z spokesperson by rehashing pop-punk clichés of yore: “All I want is a cigarette/Until I realize I’ve got none left,” he sings on the sincere acoustic ballad “Die for a Night.” If he’s done one thing right, it’s to insist that he doesn’t consider himself a true punk at all. Instead, he likens himself to Mac Miller and Lil Peep, polarizing wunderkinds whose bright careers ended in tragedy: “I got into this place where I thought the best career move would be death,” Harrison recently told NME. “I thought, ‘If I die right now, would people look beyond a horrible trend on Twitter or TikTok? Would they give me a chance?’” With this in mind, earnest declarations like “I got a fucked-up soul and an STD” sound less remorseful and more like Harrison’s attempt to conjure pathos in a way his music cannot.
While Harrison’s previous work has touched clumsily on broader topics like chasing fame, growing up queer, and even mass shootings, he asserts that Yungblud divulges profound stories about his troubled personal history. The closest he gets to real introspection is on “The Boy in the Black Dress” when he sings: “Masculinity seems to hurt a lot/The first time that you feel it in your jaw,” or on “I Cry 2” when he dispels accusations of queerbaiting by announcing, “I’ll start dating men when they go to therapy.” But it’s hard to praise Harrison for vulnerability when the songs feel this anonymous and insipid, and harder when he wastes a sample of the Cure’s “Close to Me” on infantile rhymes like “I don’t want you to hide your issues/Blow them into your tissues”—which might help you stop crying, if only because you’re laughing too hard.
It doesn’t help that none of the music on Yungblud sounds even remotely inspired. Harrison’s first two albums, 2018’s 21st Century Liability and 2020’s Weird!, interwove elements of rap with macabre pop-punk, presenting him as the UK analogue to Twenty One Pilots or his pal and collaborator Machine Gun Kelly. It might’ve felt heavy-handed and forced, but at least it was something. On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record. He is still struggling to come up with a song that doesn’t already ring a bell: From a bastardization of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” (“The Funeral”) to watered-down imitations of the 1975 (“I Cry 2”) and One Direction (“Don’t Feel Like Being Sad”), Harrison has never sounded less like the boundary-breaking eccentric he vehemently aspires to be. He’s well aware he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s not because of his unfiltered bad boy image. On Yungblud, it’s simply because the cup is empty.
