sombr | Aviva Studios, Manchester | 12 March 2026 | 8/10
There’s a moment about two-thirds through sombr’s set at Aviva Studios when the entire Warehouse floor seems to collectively hold its breath. He’s just finished “caroline” — the 2022 TikTok sleeper hit that rewrote his entire trajectory and eventually landed him a Warner Records deal — and the room is still humming with that particular electricity that only comes when a crowd has sung something back at full volume. The song ended. Nobody moved. He stood there and let it sit. Smart lad.
This is show sixty-six of sixty-nine on the Late Nights & Young Romance Tour, a run that began back in Dublin in May 2025 and has taken him through Australia, across North America, and now into the final sprint of a European leg that finishes in Ireland before one last hurrah in California. By rights, he should be running on fumes and muscle memory. Instead, he looks like this is the night he’s been building towards.
The venue upgrade is worth flagging early. Originally booked into Manchester Academy, the show moved to the Warehouse here — a shift that implies demand did what demand tends to do quietly and correctly, without any fuss. The Warehouse is a genuinely excellent room: high ceilings, strong acoustics, a floor that fills without feeling cramped. It suited him. A more intimate setting might have served the softer moments well, but when the set needed to expand, the space gave it room to breathe.
Charlotte Lawrence opened, warm and unhurried, doing exactly what a good support should: settling the room without stealing it.
Sombr opens with “i wish i knew how to quit you” — a fan-favourite deep cut that functions as a kind of statement of intent. This is not a greatest-hits-first show. He’s asking you to come to him. The crowd, to their credit, obliges immediately, and the opening trio of “i wish i knew how to quit you”, “we never dated”, and “savior” establishes both his emotional register (yearning, precise, occasionally devastating) and his live instincts (don’t rush, let the dynamics do the heavy lifting).
“perfume” is where things begin to feel genuinely special. There’s a fragility to it that could easily collapse under live conditions — the kind of delicate thing that needs care — and he handles it with enough restraint to let it land properly.
“do i ever cross your mind / or am I just a waste of time”
That couplet, mid-set during “do i ever cross your mind”, hangs in the air long enough that several people around us instinctively reach for whoever they came with. That’s the trick with sombr’s writing at its best: it’s specific enough to feel like confession, universal enough to feel like yours.
The mid-section sags only slightly. “come closer” and “in your arms” are solid enough live, but they sit in a similar emotional key and the sequencing makes the set feel momentarily flat before “undressed” and then “caroline” pull it back up. The crowd response to “caroline” — which by this point in the tour has surely been performed enough times that it could run on autopilot — is remarkable. Every word back, every breath anticipated. It doesn’t feel like a nostalgia moment for a two-year-old song; it feels live and urgent. That’s down to him.
“Homewrecker” is the night’s interesting gamble. Released in February of this year, it’s the freshest material in the set — the first new single since his debut album — and UK audiences are only just getting their hands around it. He plays it with enough confidence that it doesn’t feel like a placeholder for something the room hasn’t caught up to yet. It earns its place. Whether it signals a stylistic shift or just a moment of restlessness is harder to judge from one live performance, but it lands.
“canal street” and “crushing” provide a run of emotional intensity before “under the mat” closes the main set quietly, a choice that trusts the audience to sit with something unresolved rather than demanding catharsis on cue.
The encore, “back to friends” into “12 to 12”, is the obvious closer sequence and he knows it, playing both with a looseness the earlier set didn’t always allow. “back to friends” — the one that reached the top of Spotify’s Global Weekly Chart and introduced him to the sort of numbers most artists spend careers chasing — is enormous live in a way that feels genuinely earned rather than engineered. By “12 to 12”, the room has given everything it has.
What distinguishes him from a dozen other young singer-songwriters working in the same post-bedroom-pop idiom is an instinct for when to pull back. There’s no unnecessary theatrics here, no over-produced light show competing with the songs. The songs are the show — which sounds obvious until you realise how rarely acts at this stage of their career actually believe it.
He came out by his tour bus afterwards, apparently, and stayed long enough to make a proper occasion of it. Sixty-six shows in, and he’s still doing that. Make of that what you will.
For a debut headline tour closing its final lap, this was everything it needed to be and a few things it didn’t need to be — which is, genuinely, the best thing you can say about a gig in March.