Yungblud returns with… a nine-minute rock anthem?

Yungblud has emerged from his online hibernation with a middle finger to streaming algorithms, releasing a nine-minute rock opus titled “Hello Heaven, Hello”. The 27-year-old Doncaster native, whose last two albums topped UK charts (and who’s accumulated a casual six billion streams), has apparently decided that what Gen Z really needs is the rock equivalent of “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

“I’ve been discouraged from releasing a nine-minute and six second song because it’s seen as a ‘risk,’” Yungblud explained, presumably while a Spotify executive somewhere had a minor aneurysm. “I don’t see it that way at all — I see it as an opportunity.” An opportunity to confuse playlist curators everywhere, perhaps.

The track reportedly germinated four years ago when Harrison was alone in a New York hotel room, having the kind of existential crisis that can only be resolved by writing the longest possible single. “I felt like I was starting to repeat myself — I’d fallen into my own cliche,” he said, before creating something that spans multiple rock subgenres in a single track.

The release comes with an obligatory music video by Charlie Sarsfield that will be plastered across MTV’s increasingly irrelevant network of channels and Paramount’s Times Square billboards. Meanwhile, Bludfest, Yungblud’s own festival, returns to Milton Keynes’s National Bowl on the 21st of June — there, forty-thousand fans will gather to hear what will presumably be the extended fifteen-minute live version of his new anthem.

Whether this is creative brilliance or commercial suicide remains to be seen, but at least no one can accuse Yungblud of being predictable.