We thought we had YUNGBLUD figured out. A distinctive face, a slogan, and an electric energy that has been shaking up pop-punk playlists since his debut. But ‘Idols’ is a slap in the face to anyone who expected him to repeat the same formula. Here, Dominic Harrison strips away the trappings to construct a broader, more ambitious album, where raw urgency flirts with orchestral grandeur. You don't pick and choose from Idols: you go through it, sometimes against the grain, often with the feeling that an overly accessible chorus would be almost treasonous.

It all starts with “Hello Heaven, Hello”, a nine-minute launch pad that dares to use a cinematic intro. Layers of strings, breathing drums, a guitar that trails behind like a thread of tension. YUNGBLUD plants his first seeds of vulnerability: a voice that is more fragile than shouted, a hesitant breath, and already this idea of spectacle that we never quite know how to place – confession, requiem, provocation? The album settles in, refusing to give in to the obvious.

Further on, ‘Idols’ is bursting with colour. ‘Lovesick Lullaby’ revives Britpop (Oasis...) with a touch of black kohl, somewhere between a stadium anthem and a mosh pit in a seedy club. The guitars snap, the bass crawls, the drums explode at times like a firecracker that someone forgot to extinguish. In contrast, ‘Zombie’ leaves everyone facing silence: a track that seems to have been in the making for five years, where the fear of being a burden to others becomes almost palpable in every muffled chord. YUNGBLUD swaps screams for whispers, before revving things up again on ‘Change’, where brass and strings dialogue with riffs that refrain from saturating too early.

It's easy to see that Harrison has crafted Idols as a collection of snapshots: each track explores a different corner of his own mythology, with a soundscape that challenges his usual habits. He layers the tracks, dares to use unexpected orchestrations, sometimes superimposing a rock fanfare over a dirty bass line, or layering choirs over slurred guitar solos. On “Ghosts”, his voice stretches, verging on breaking, carried by a military drum like a heart beating too fast, reminiscent of early U2 with oriental elements. “Fire” lets it all spill out: sexual tension à la The Doors, feedback, an almost animalistic groove, as if the album remembered that it's also meant to make you sweat.

You could say that ‘Idols’ is too long, that it gets lost in its ambitions, that it sometimes lacks restraint. But that's precisely where it finds its truth: in rejecting formulaic songs in favour of the shock of a collision between a stripped-down piano and a dirty riff, a fragile verse and a soaring string section. When “Supermoon” rings out, the last note left like a hastily scribbled word, we understand that all this is just a pretext for exposing oneself without decoration. The punk freak show monster has dropped its mask: all that remains is a battered idol that we look at without filter, and which reflects our own image back to us.