Yungblud at Reading Festival 2021: “I’ve got two new albums ready to go”

We may have the answer to the internet’s most-posed conundrum: would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Yungblud, seemingly, fancies his chances against a moon-sized duckie if his new stage set-up, bolstered by a gigantic red inflatable bird. Why so, we ask? “Exactly,” Dom Harrison responds to NME backstage at Reading Festival. Er, OK.

He’s got bigger things on his mind, namely new pyrotechnics to keep an eye on: “I was a bit nervous because I’ve never played with fire on stage before. I nearly got blown up four times in Leeds, my mum was white as a ghost watching from the crowd.”

• Yungblud at Reading Festival 2021: Gen-Z’s rock’n’roll star makes his bid for the top

His new song ‘Fleabag’ got an airing at Leeds the day prior and left him already surprised that his fans knew the words: “Everyone knows Fleabag already, it’s mental. I wanted to teach them the song with this skit and be cocky, but they’d already done their homework.”

After this weekend though, focus turns to a UK-wide tour and completing not one, but two new albums that he’s got in the bag. “We’ve got album three and four done and ready to go. At the start of this year around Christmas when ‘Weird!’ went to Number One, everyone said ‘go on holiday, have a rest’, but I went straight up to Leeds to a studio 20 minutes from where I grew up and wrote an album, then went to America and wrote another one.”

“I can’t wait for you to hear it. A lot of people had an expectation of what I should do next and with success comes a lot of conversation around what Yungblud is and the perception of whatever the fuck I am and everyone’s got an opinion on it – but I’m so excited to release this because it’s just me. I went out to America and did a load of sessions but I came back because I didn’t want to do that so I made it in my mate’s bedroom. This is how it should be done.”

Watch the full interview with Yungblud backstage at Reading Festival above