During an appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” on Monday (Dec. 15th), Yungblud and host Stern got into a disagreement over the state of rock ‘n’ roll.
When Stern stated that he feels “like rock is dead, and it makes me sad because I love rock ‘n’ roll music,” Yungblud pushed back, taking the comment as a challenge to prove him wrong.
“Rock music is so brilliant, it gets its flowers in hindsight because it’s such a sacred genre,” Yungblud responded. “Every dad says, ‘I don’t like that band, it sounds like… a band that they knew as a kid.’ Every f*cking dad says to his kid, ‘I don’t like that! That sounds like what I knew’. It always happens.”
“The reason rock music is coming back at the minute… people always put so much pressure on one person bringing it back: ‘Who’s gonna save rock ‘n’ roll?’ That’s a load of bullshit, you know what I mean?” he continued.
“It’s spherical at the minute. In hardcore, you’ve got Knocked Loose and Turnstile; in punk you’ve got Amyl & The Sniffers and Lambrini Girls; in indie you’ve got Fontaines [D.C.] and Geese and Wunderhorse.”
The musician then went on to explain that he wanted to “bring a sense of theatre and showmanship and adventure… in a 2025 way” to his latest album “Idols.”
“It was a f*cking risk, man. When we went in to play the first single – which is nine minutes [long] – to the label, they went f*cking green. But we were in a place where we have a community, we have a culture, we have a fanbase that will go with us,” Yungblud said.
“I think it was mad to do, but to see the amount of people that have got behind it and loved it has been f*cked up, you know?”
“Idols” recently received a nomination for Best Rock Album at the 2026 Grammys. The album’s third single, “Zombie,” was also nominated for Best Rock Song – an achievement Yungblud described to Stern as “just wild.”
