Photographer Emilia Staugaard
Fashion Director Nathan Henry at RSA Films Photo & Art
Words Tessa Swantek
Hair Charles Stanley using Oribe
Makeup Maria Comparetto using Dior Beauty
Photography Assistant Andrea Brandt
Stylist Assistant Stoyan Chuchuranov
YUNGBLUD, or Dom Harrison, wakes up as a blank, black canvas. Morning is the death of the day before, a birth of the day to come. In our conversation, Dom revives the very beginning of his career just as quickly as he coils toward how he envisions a legacy, and they converge at some indiscriminate point in the middle, where I meet him, as he sits on a cheetah print chair in his closet, dressed in black. He tells me, “YUNGBLUD will always be here for you, whether you want it or not, in me closet in Camden Town. It will always be a shoulder to cry on. It will one day feel as good as it did when you first found it.”
We talk about his next album and BLUDFEST. He tells me, “This [next] album has had three relapses, a birth, and a fucking death. It’s serendipitous because it’s about life.” He calls BLUDFEST “a bookend” and when he says it, I internally question whether he meant it as a beginning or end - I settle on both. It’s the culmination of everything before, and the conception of everything after. He’s looking to create something ever-changing, but ever-lasting, like breaking waves in the ocean.
Photographed by Emilia Staugaard, they spent a Sunday together in Camden Town. He kissed some windows, sat fully clothed in a bathtub, and ran around the streets of London, tongue out. Maybe the best Sunday ever if you ask us?
“I hope [my fans] fucking have a whole story after the gig. I hope they have coffee next week. I hope they’re at each other's wedding. I hope they get married. I hope they’re pen pals on the other side of the world when they get a job. I’m naive if I don’t know that people will come and go from YUNGBLUD.”
We talk a lot about his close-knit community who alongside Dom have "created a world because they didn't want to live in the one they got dealt," Dom included. On theme with the print issue, we talk about making change - actual change - as he says.
And since Dom says it wouldn't be an interview without his mum calling him, that happens too.
Take in the full 20-page story beyond this teaser. Our brand new Spring Summer 2024 issue Breaking Waves is available to buy online and in select stores worldwide.
