Yungblud has praised Katy Perry in a new interview, saying that her songs ‘California Gurls’ and ‘I Kissed A Girl’ “felt so punk rock to me”.

The Doncaster musician, who recently released his second album ‘Weird!’, said that he considered Perry to be “such a rock star”.

Speaking to The Daily Star, Yungblud recalled hearing Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ (released in May 2010) and her 2008 debut single ‘I Kissed A Girl’ for the first time, saying that “all that stuff was so punk rock to me”.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember anyone else at that time doing anything like that,” he added, before explaining how Perry influenced the song ‘Cotton Candy’ on ‘Weird!’.

“I just wanted a balls-to-the-wall song about sex, sexual liberation [and] fluidity, and talk about everyone’s ever-evolving idea of sexuality,” Yungblud said.

The artist recently spoke about the “huge” influence that the late Amy Winehouse also had on ‘Weird!’, which went to number one earlier this month.

“Like, once I started to get a little bit bigger a lot more fucking cooks come in the kitchen, and I’d have some meeting where a label executive would say they wanted to ‘normalise me’ and make a song that’ll just be big for TikTok,” he recalled while speaking about the influence he drew from Winehouse.

“I’d have Amy in my ear going: ‘Fuck off, mate – tell the fucking truth’.”