It’s hard to imagine someone having a bigger 2025 than YUNGBLUD. He dropped a sprawling homage to the rock music that shaped him with his album Idols in June, then backed up that hero worship with his cover of “Changes,” the breakout performance at the final Black Sabbath show in July. After Ozzy Osbourne died a couple weeks later, he performed a tribute alongside Aerosmith at the MTV Video Music Awards. “A lot of my idols took note of that and have given me crazy opportunities that I was ready to grab by the horns, and it’s been a mental year,” he tells Apple Music. And now a capstone: luring Aerosmith out of semi-retirement for One More Time, a five-track EP that includes a new version of the band’s 1976 song “Back in the Saddle.” YUNGBLUD is clearly relishing his role as interlocutor of, and heir apparent to, the legends who influenced him and is gladly accepting their advice in return as his own star rises quickly. “Everyone that I’ve met, from Steven to Ozzy to Glenn Danzig, they’ve always said, ‘Block out the noise, be as authentic as you can, and people will understand it later,’” he says. “It always hits me so hard, because especially in rock music, there’s always a negativity to something new.” In sound and tone, One More Time taps into Aerosmith’s mid-’90s renaissance period, channeling the wit and radio-friendly sheen on songs like “Problems,” “Wild Woman,” and the de rigueur power ballad “A Thousand Days.” But YUNGBLUD is taking his newfound proximity to greatness with humility and wonder: “I really feel like I’m a cat who’s been thrown off a building and finally landed on his feet.”