Aerosmith & Yungblud – My Only Angel

Closing the theme day with a touching reminder that, regardless of what decade you were born in, you too can participate in a “who can open their mouth the widest” competition…

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Julian Axelrod: You can tell a lot about an artist by which legacy act they recruit for a cross-generational collab. By linking up with the unkillable scarf mannequins of Aerosmith 2025, Yungblud is sending a clear message: no matter the year, no matter the genre, no matter if it’s a music video or a rollercoaster or a cartoon, Yungblud will be around in some capacity. And he will be yowling.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: After fifteen truly unpleasant opening seconds this becomes a perfectly adequate piece of Real Rock Music that could’ve been made any year since they invented guitars that sound like that (1983 or so?). The most impressive thing is that Yungblud sounds notably worse than 77-year-old Stephen Tyler — in terms of his collaborations with rock royalty he worked better (marginally!) as the pop version of a hardcore band’s screamer when pared with MGK back last decade.
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Tim de Reuse: There’s a phenomenon wherein bands that once loved for their vocal harmonies tend to lean further into it when they’re past their prime, to disastrous results: over-accentuating the highs until the formants scratch your eardrums, compressing them into an astringent, papery hellscape, pushing them forward until they’re the only thing you can perceive in the mix, even cannibalizing their songwriting talent to create more room for anodyne major chords. This is possibly the worst case of it I’ve ever seen.
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Will Adams: Steven Tyler’s got that thing most long-running acts get with their voice: technically all right, still recognizable, but audibly processed, as if their vocals are surrounded by a thick gel. Yungblud’s strained screech suggests he won’t even have that by the time he’s 35. It distracts from what is otherwise an acceptable slice of Good Ol’ Rock Just Like Dad Used To Make.
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Ian Mathers: One of the first cracks in my childhood belief that I only liked rock music was Aerosmith having a bunch of shitty hits; seeing just how much Tyler and Perry (and maybe the other guys, who cares) leaned into “rawk” signifiers made me go “wait, maybe a lot of this stuff is deeply uncool” for the first time. And now they’ve teamed up with one of my least favourite “look at what a rock guy I am” singers of the last decade for him and Tyler to indulge in the vocal equivalent of chewing the scenery. It’s like adding piss to a shit sandwich. But at least they’re all shirtless in the video!
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Nortey Dowuona: Yungblud, you could have kept this for yourself. Matt Schwartz, you should have told them the song was unsalvageable and that you and Yungblud had to go away for a while and fix it. Also, Joe Perry, those filters you put on your guitar pedal were faulty; fix them. Steven Tyler… I don’t even know.
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