Inside Track: Yungblud

Matt Schwartz at NRG Studios, one of many studios used for the making of One More Time.Photo: Kyle Hoffmann

Yungblud capped a triumphant 2025 with a hit collaboration with Aerosmith. Long‑term producer Matt Schwartz was behind the desk.

Producer Matt Schwartz vividly recalls his first meeting with a teenage Dominic Harrison. “I met Dom in 2016, when he was 19. Labels sometimes send me artists for a chat to see if they’re the real deal or not, because I’m pretty harsh. I dig into someone’s soul. So my manager and friend Tommas [Arnby] asked me to check out this kid he’d found. Dom came in, and played me some songs, and I stopped him, and said, ‘What is this? It sounds like bad Ed Sheeran. We already have Ed Sheeran. And do you think teenagers are stupid? If not, why are you writing stupid lyrics? If you want to work with me, I want another Bowie or Freddie Mercury. If you want to be an artist, figure out what you want to say, and what culture you want to build.’

“Eight months later, Tommas calls me again, and says, ‘You got to meet the kid again.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘Because you don’t realise what that meeting has done to him. He locked himself in a bedroom for eight months and figured out who he wants to be as an artist.’ So Dom came in, and had this crazy look in his eyes, and his whole mannerism had changed. The first song he played me was ‘King Charles’, and I was blown away. We recorded that song there and then, in four hours, including mixing and mastering. Yungblud was born. We also did the next five records really quickly. I was thinking to myself, ‘He’s so young, and to write those lyrics with that vocabulary is amazing.’ Over time I also became a much better writer myself through working with him. His ability has pushed me to places I never thought I could go.”

‘King Charles’ was released as Yungblud’s first single in 2017. The artist’s first album, 21st Century Liability, produced by Schwartz, Martin Terefe, Sluggo and Patrick Russel, was released in 2018. Aided by hit singles like ‘11 Minutes’ (2018, with Halsey and Travis Barker), which Schwartz co‑wrote and produced, and ‘I Think I’m Okay’ (2019, with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker), Yungblud’s star continued to rise, culminating in 2025 in the number one album Idols and the EP One More Time (with Aerosmith) and his momentous performance at the Black Sabbath Back To The Beginning concert.

Idol Moments

“Generally, it’s just Dom and I, in an enclosed environment, without outside interference. I’ll usually sit at the computer and record. He plays everything, I play everything, we’re good. We’re not virtuosos, but with the computer we’re the best. We’ll grab guitars, or are on a piano, or sometimes a bass line triggers something, and we’ll sing some ideas. Once we have a rough idea, we’ll jump on a microphone and develop it. Sometimes we start with a concept or a lyric. A melody inspires you to do another melody or another lyric, and suddenly it morphs into a story. It’s an amazing process.

Matt Schwartz: If you’re an artist, never let anyone else start your ideas for you. Ever. If you work with somebody else, you need to start the idea.

“The one thing that is crucial is that I insist that Dom starts the idea, every time. If you’re an artist, never let anyone else start your ideas for you. Ever. If you work with somebody else, you need to start the idea. They need to be inspired by your ideas, not you by their ideas. That’s the rule. That’s what real artists who write their own songs do. You cannot be in the shackles of a record label. You cannot be in the shackles of a producer or another writer, or whatever. The greatest artists always inspire the people around them. Whether it’s in music, whether it’s in style and fashion, whether it’s in ideas of how to promote things and marketing — you have to inspire, you have to get everybody to go with all your crazy ideas. Starting with a backing track limits what you can do with the song.”

Going Slow

The opener of Idols and also the album’s first single, a nine‑minute epic called ‘Hello Heaven, Hello’, was co‑written by the two of them, plus guitarist Adam Warrington, and composer and producer Bob Bradley, known for his work with Jeff Beck. “We went up to Bob’s studio in north England, and Dom had the idea for the first section, which was good. He went to bed and I said to Adam, ‘Let’s try something.’ We came up with the basis for what became the middle section, and I thought, ‘This is effing sick, let’s connect it to the first section. Dom must have heard what we had done while asleep, because when he woke up, he thought it was part of a dream. He said, ‘I have some ideas, let me go on the mic,’ and I was like, ‘Go go go.’ He went in and immediately came up with what’s on the record. It was insane. Dom found a real and natural persona on that track that really inspired the rest of what we were doing.

“Then I was like, ‘You know what? It’s missing a third part.’ Everybody thought I was crazy, but we got this great other idea. I started orchestrating it, and tried to fit the three sections together. However, the problem was that the new section was in a different bpm. How do we go from 83 bpm to 94, or the other way round? I decided to automate the tempo change in Logic, but because of a slip of the mouse, or whatever, the tempo dropped to 5bpm. It went all the way to 5bpm and then back up to 94, and it sounded incredible. Everybody on the sofa looked at me with their mouths wide open.

A mousing accident created the wild tempo swing that became the hallmark of ‘Hello Heaven, Hello’.

“When we went to live performance, the guy who was doing FOH was using Ableton, and I sent him the parts he had to play from his computer, with a MIDI file, so he could do the tempo change. However, it was not working in Ableton, though it worked fine in Pro Tools and Logic. We found that Ableton only goes down to 20 bpm. I contacted Ableton, and told them. They were like ‘What? We’ve never heard anybody go to 5bpm. Why?’ I’m like, ‘Well, there’s always one, isn’t there?’ I hope they’re sorting it out.”

Time Travel

Although the arrival of One More Time half a year after the release of Idols and Yungblud’s Birmingham performance appears like a natural progression, the collaborative EP was a long time in the making. In September 2023, Aerosmith had been forced to abort their farewell tour because of damage to Steven Tyler’s vocal cords, and in August 2024 the band took the decision to abandon touring altogether. During that year, guitarist Joe Perry, bored at home in...