Yungblud pulls out of tomorrow's Calgary show: "I'm working on myself"

Yungblud will not be on stage tomorrow. His management pulled him from Sunday's Cowboys Music Festival slot in Calgary, part of his Idols World Tour, with Nelly and Steve Aoki stepping in. His own statement: "To all my family in Canada I apologize for not being there with you all this weekend. I'm currently in a place where I'm working on myself and taking time off at home in the UK. I'm taking this extremely seriously and facing head on what's going on for the good of the long term." The tour is set to resume on 28 July in Indianapolis.

The cancellation did not come out of nowhere. At his own Bludfest on 27 June he broke down mid-set and told the crowd: "Lately, I have been so disconnected from everything. I have been trying my best to wake up every day. I have felt in pain a lot, and I don't know why, for a long time." In a post afterwards he described it as a year of emotion he had not been able to process, and said the real breakdown came twenty minutes after he walked off.

Two words

In recent months Yungblud has faced repeated accusations of being an "industry plant": the claim that his career was manufactured by a label rather than earned. The loudest version came from Machine Gun Kelly, a former collaborator, who referenced him with the line "Mickey Mouse kids turned rockstars" on the track "Fix Ur Face" and later claimed in an Instagram comment that Yungblud had cancelled a tour over ticket sales rather than mental health. Worth noting: the two made "I Think I'm Okay" together in 2019, a song about struggling and admitting it.

Yungblud addressed the discourse himself after Bludfest: "When things appear to happen so quickly, and you get millions of eyes upon you that didn't know you existed two hours before, of course it feels unbelievable, of course it feels disingenuous, of course it feels inauthentic." SZA was among the artists who publicly backed him after the post.

From where we stood

We shot Yungblud at Sziget in 2023. You can argue about marketing budgets and major-label push all day. What you cannot manufacture is a festival field an hour deep into a set, screaming every word back. Whatever an industry plant is supposed to be, the thing in front of our cameras that night was not it.

Artists keep telling us the album-promo-tour cycle leaves no room to process anything. This week one of them stopped mid-cycle to say it out loud. That deserves a quieter internet than the one he got.

Credits

Yungblud at Sziget Festival 2023, shot by Colin Darbyshire and Annelies Vollmuller for Coda Photos.