YUNGBLUD

BUILDING A UNIQUE GLOBAL COMMUNITY AND SENDING A WAKE-UP CALL TO ALTERNATIVE CULTURE, YUNGBLUD HAS MADE 2019 HIS OWN. HE REVEALS HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN, FROM MOMENTOUS COLLABORATIONS AND DREAM SHOWS TO LIFE AT THE HEART OF A PHENOMENON.

- Jack Rogers

You’re our Artist Of The Year! How does that feel?

“It feels absolutely mental. It feels like it’s reflective of everything that has happened over the past year. Every single day I can’t believe something is happening. Everything feels unfathomable. I was never doing this for any other reason than to find a community of people who can come together to make each other’s worlds a bit more tolerable. Now I’m winning awards? Crazy.”

Seeing something that you’ve created deliver physical accolades must be so bizarre when it’s something you’d never really considered, yet it’s a physical marker of just how much this has actually grown.

“Absolutely. The thing about it is that Yungblud is still becoming less and less about me. It’s us. It’s a unit. It’s a way of thinking and a way of talking and a way of being. It’s becoming more and more of that every single day all over the world. I’ve never looked at ticket sales, I’m too busy trying to meet and talk to people. Yet I’ll turn up at a venue and go, ‘Fuck me, this is massive’ and someone will say, ‘Yeah, you’ve sold 2,500 tickets in Russia tonight’, and I’m just like, ‘What?’”

So let’s go back to the start of the year. What were you thinking when the clock hit midnight on New Year’s Eve and 2019 was officially here?

“That this was going to be my year. 2018 had happened. We had played all of these tours and had offers flying at us but most importantly we had this fanbase that was small but just as loyal and mutual as it is now. I just knew I had to grow that tenfold. I feel like when the clock strikes 12 at the end of this year I will be thinking the exact same thing as well.”