Chants of “Yungblud! Yungblud!” start up before 22-year-old Dominic Harrison hits the stage and deafening audience screaming greets his entrance. He bounds on, all black clothes, chains and eyeliner, looking like a young Gary Numan auditioning for a part in John Carpenter’s Halloween. He jumps three feet in the air while singing as the young audience heroically try to do the same. Then he wiggles his tongue at them like Kiss’s Gene Simmons and pelts from one side of the stage to the other, yelling: “Manchester! Let’s go!”
Despite the obvious forebears, the Doncaster-born star has a distinctive USP: a fast-rising, androgynous, emo-rapper in gender-fluid clothes with a South Yorkshire accent as broad as Brian Glover’s PE teacher in Kes. “It’s good to be back in the fuckin’ north, like,” he says. Yungblud’s songs address everything from teenage concerns and parents (“It’s alright, we’ll survive / ’Cause parents ain’t always right”) to drugs, mental health and “perpetual frustration”. Finding an audience, he says, saved his life when everyone else was calling him “freak or weirdo”.
Yungblud is certainly an incorrigible – if slightly cheesy – showman, conducting the crowd, encoring in a short black dress and standing back to marvel at the lunacy and slam-dancing he inspires. If only so much of his music wasn’t so garish. With its formulaic choruses, wailing solos, cartoonish hooks (“Yi yi yi yah!”) and everything turned up to the max – especially the volume – it is an aural Turkish delight: best in small doses, sickly after too much.
That said, he has his moments. Original Me and Loner are big glam outsider anthems, Anarchist is naggingly catchy, and the atypical ballad Waiting on the Weekend is lovely, with hints of his South Yorkshire neighbour Richard Hawley’s sound. By the time Yungblud tells the crowd he loves them for the 354,876th time, the showmanship grates too, but not before he’s led chants of “Fuck Boris Johnson” and “Fuck Brexit” and told his flock: “Arm in arm we are united.” Yungblud won’t appeal to many over-21s, but he’s got the youth vote.
• At O2 Academy Brixton, London, on 21 November. Then touring the UK until 20 November.
