Sombr Responds to TikTok Criticism of His ‘Cringe’ Tour
Photo: Billboard via Getty Images
Is it a crime to be cringe? Or is there something more serious happening here? Over the weekend, 20-year-old Taylor Swift–approved singer Sombr responded to a TikToker’s negative review of his October 13 concert in Washington, DC, stating that her viral video prompted a flood of “body-shaming” against him and calling her confusion over his immature jokes a “skill issue.” However, she is standing by claims that Sombr behaves inappropriately in front of a “tween” fan base.
In an eight-and-a-half-minute video with more than 5.4 million views to date, a 25-year-old TikToker advises anyone over the age of 16 not to attend a Sombr show and calls him cringe. She compares the demographics of the concert attendees to a middle-school dance and shares her issues with him making brainrot jokes (think: the 6-7 parent) and having a dating-show segment, in which he brings fans onstage to call their exes.
She goes on to suggest that some of his behavior was inappropriate given the age of the audience, citing him asking the crowd to bark — which he come across during other shows — and claiming that at the DC show, he said “super-vulgar stuff about getting his dick sucked.” At one point, she compared him to Slenderman and expressed shock that people see him as a “sex symbol” or this generation’s David Bowie. Ultimately, the TikToker said she hated the experience and left early.
Many issues. She did not enjoy Sombr’s opening act, Devon Gabriella. On X, Devon Gabriella said that there is a difference between sharing an opinion and being “MEAN” and called for women to support women. She later deleted a tweet telling her fans that they “truly ride at dawn,” explaining that she took it down to prevent misunderstandings that she knew about or condoned death threats that were sent to the TikToker. While she later said that she felt bad that the artist “took it so tough,” the TikToker stood by her opinion that the performance was “really bad.”
He characterized the situation as “TikTok drama” that started because of a content creator who thought his concert was cringe. In an apparent reference to her Slenderman comparison, he accuses her video of prompting a “massive body-shaming hate train” towards him online. “I totally respect people having opinions, but I am a 20-year-old artist — freshly 20,” he says in a video. “And if you’re 25 years old and you’re going to come to my concert and don’t expect people younger than you to be there, when I, the artist, am five years younger than you, it’s just a skill issue.” He adds that he jokes for only about five minutes onstage, and he advises people to find “problematic people to hate on, because (he is) just existing.” Towards the end, he gives a “tutorial” and shows himself touching grass.
In case you touch grass too often to keep up with the trending artists of the day, yes, Role Model and Sombr are two different people. The TikToker posted and deleted a screenshot on her Story that appeared to show that Role Model liked her video — “It seemed like he thought he was Role Model vibes, but he was so far off,” she says at one point in the original. In a follow-up videoshe denied Photoshopping the image and said she took it down because she’d heard that people were sending hate to Role Model because of it.
It seems as though she disliked his post just as much as she disliked his concert. In a response videoshe suggested that he was calling her “geriatric” for being 25 and using “body-shaming” accusations as a distraction. She questioned why he acknowledged that his audience is young but not her claims that he is “weird in front of kids”: “If you know your audience is young teens, you admit that — and you say I need to expect that when I go to a concert, why are we grabbing our dick onstage?” she said. “Why are we thrusting? ‘Bark for me.’ ‘Yeah, I’m daddy.’ ‘Good girl.’ Oh, the children!”
Not yet. He is still on tour and has heard Saturday Night Live debut coming up — just a month after Role Model.