On December 4th musical artist YUNGBLUD, AKA Dominic Harrison released his new album weird! to the public, and to say it directly, the album is great.
Harrison’s music has been rooted in the theme of encouraging the different, the crazy, the alternative, and the angsty. Weird! follows suit— it’s filled with a variety of sounds that still ring true to Dominic’s style of music.
The first single, “weird!” was released on April 22, 2020, at the height of the pandemic where the word “weird” rang a little too true for the entire globe. “Come hold my hand / Hold it tight / We’re in a weird time of life”–what would 2020 be if it was not a “weird time of life.” All around the world we have been stuck in our houses with little-to-no contact with people outside short interactions between grocery-store employees and constant Zoom calls. YUNGBLUD likely wrote this song before the pandemic, but similar to listening to a song about heartbreak when you are eight vs. when you are 22 and your partner just broke up with you, the lyrics have a different meaning because of the new context. A pandemic? Definitely weird. Mental health is disintegrating all over the globe; introverts are realizing they have been ambiverts the whole time. 2020 was the year of “weird” and having to remind ourselves that we need to hold on even if the entire globe is experiencing despair. I listened to this single so much when it first came out, it ended up in the top 15 of my top 100 playlist put together by Apple Music. That being said, that does not necessarily mean that “weird!” was the best single Dominic released to introduce his sophomore album.
“Strawberry lipstick” and “cotton candy” both felt like true YUNGBLUD songs. My absolute favorite part about these singles is how both are made to blast from your speakers and the lyrics are made to scream from the top of your lungs. It’s a lot of sex, drugs and rock & roll with lyrics like, “She’s such a tease… She’s gonna suck on my strawberry lipstick” and “So we just have sex, to solve all our problems, let’s do it again/And I wanna get stuck between your teeth like cotton candy.” The themes are reminiscent of the groupie-culture common in the early rock-n-roll and Woodstock eras. Free love, lots of drugs, no commitment.
Other songs like “mars,” “superdeadfriends,” “charity,” and “ice cream man” are full of angst, all honing in on the societal pressure to fit in, supporting those that go against the grain like YUNGBLUD himself. Many of Harrison’s songs tell variations of the same story: feeling like you are alone in the world, dreaming of a better life without judgment, and the overall theme of “f**k ‘em, who cares if you’re different.” While I think this is a powerful theme, I do hope that YUNGBLUD begins making some more politically-charged and controversial songs like his tracks “King Charles” and “Tin Pan Boy” from his first self-titled EP released in 2018. Internal acceptance is important. However, he could really flourish with more of the original-punk anti-establishment theme, it might even expand his demographic of listeners to more millennial and even older generations of punks.
What I found different about this album in comparison to Harrison’s previous endeavors was including more introspection rather than only outwards projections to his fanbase. “I’m lost in the supermarket/Shopping for my sense of self/I wander down the aisles/Trying to figure out/Where I disappeared to.” It felt like the perfect year to turn to introspection, especially since many of us have had to do more self-reflection than probably any of us ever wanted to during quarantine. Walking through the supermarket during the pandemic has felt aimless–there’s little interaction, and for some of us, it has given us the fortunate (or unfortunate) space to analyze our thoughts, considering who we were, are, and who we want to be–wondering where the “old-me” went. The face-value analysis is just looking inwards, but the context of the lyrics reminded me of my spacey-walkthroughs of the grocery store, forgetting what I even needed because I am too deep in my thoughts.
The lowkey songs on the album are peaceful, like a lullaby, but still harmonize with the rest of the tracks. I was actually surprised that “it’s quiet in beverly hills” was the penultimate song— it was so quiet and calm, it seemed like it would be hard to follow up it’s angelic tone. However, YUNGBLUD impressed again by somehow transitioning to the best song of the album, “the freak show”. The concluding song is reminiscent of Melanie Martinez’s “Carousel” on Cry Baby. Coming from someone who used to listen to that album on repeat in 2015, I can honestly say that YUNGBLUD’s alternative punk “version” won. The song is a mic-drop, and there couldn’t have been a better finale.
