The Song: “12 to 12”
from the 2025 album I Barely Know Her by sombr
reached #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 (so far?)
It is 26 March 2026. My annual music piece planned for World Autism Day is due to be published in less than a week’s time. And I am staring yet again at the screen, pleading with my brain to form just one coherent sentence.
The cause of all this anguish is American alt-rock singer Sombr, whose sadboi vibes have been taking emo kids everywhere by storm. His song “12 to 12”, a disco-infused track that nudged its way into the upper half of the Billboard charts in America (and top-10 in quite a few other places), has recently become my favourite song of 2025. I am taken by its throwback vibes, its multiple inspirations, and its general evocation of bygone eras, and this has struck me as an excellent topic of discussion. No more of that meta moaning about how finding meaning in pop songs is a fool’s errand; just good old-fashioned exploration of the way nostalgia has shaped the music tastes of the 2020s.
That over-confident plan lasted about two weeks. After a solid start at the beginning of March, the word count has now been stuck for the past fortnight at 600 words or so: I am woefully out of practice, can barely find the time to write, and even if I could the thoughts in my mind are stubbornly refusing to coalesce into cohesive threads — and I can’t even pull the meta card and write about that, because I already did that last year.
Trying to find some sort of entry point, I fire up the song again. I haven’t listened to the song for a while, but the moment it starts up — the moment those ominous synths announce themselves, rolling in like a wave — it’s like I’ve found a long-lost friend, a welcoming arm around my shoulders. And as the drums follow suit, and the four-on-the-floor pounds my head, it hits me, and I decide: to hell with all those grand plans. It’s a brilliant song. Just write about that.
To quite a few people, liking Sombr is cringe at best and dangerous at worst. Despite only breaking out on the scene last year, this 20-year-old kid — I speak relatively — has already amassed quite a body of commentary around him, not all of it positive. Some look at his songwriting, exemplified through the ten tracks on his album I Barely Know Her (already he does himself no favours with that laboured pun of a title), and grimace at its immaturity and possessiveness. Others have focused on his concerts, which I am told are mostly frequented by people a whole decade younger than him, and declared his onstage antics, such as phoning an attendee’s ex, creepy and rather entitled. (Are these people right to be concerned, or is it a classic case of parasocial relationships? Or is it both? I leave it up to you to decide.)
But there is one song that even the most negative of commentators will grudgingly like. “12 to 12” was relatively submerged in I Barely Know Her’s promotional cycle, arriving as the FOURTH single from the album; yet it’s such an obvious pop song that one can only attribute its lateness to a delayed spark of creativity. It wastes no time in getting going — barely have the synths introduced themselves then the drums jostle to the front, not even bothering to wait for the customary second strike, and together they just start moving, sashaying down the street like Sombr does in the music video. (His walk is the sort that a stereotypically self-conscious man in his twenties will do when trying to be fancy. I have imitated it so many times.)
Already there are two eras clashing here: the disco beat of 1977 running up hard against the dreamy haze of synthesisers from 1983. Neither of these are new or even innovative: there’s a long tradition of alt-rock artists meshing the two to make angsty songs that you can dance to. (Indeed, it seems to be my favourite genre of music to talk about.) But the end result in “12 to 12” is somehow even more era-transcendant than so many other songs that combine danceability and dreamy doom. It doesn’t just energise, it feels literally inevitable: the moment the beat kicks in, you are barrelling towards a bottomless chasm, a pit of unfathomable misery. The pit opens up wide to receive you, and there is nothing you can do but be swept along.
And then Sombr opens his mouth, which means it’s time to talk about the lyrics. They are exactly the sort of lyric you expect an angsty teenager to have written, which is to say histrionic and mostly fragmentary. “I don’t want anyone else/ From the hours of 12 to 12,” he sings, a wonderfully obtuse word salad that pretty much sets your expectations for the rest of the song. For the next three and a half minutes, we find him either uttering excoriating himself (“you look at me, it makes me melt…”) or excoriating his partner (“… I know you wanna see me in hell”), often within the same sentence (as it is here). Mostly what it demonstrates is a rather huffy and immature fuck-you attitude, the kind you usually find in teen pop songs.
Is there something more sinister behind this attitude? I hesitate to say, and I don’t want to make the mistake of minimising any of this. But at the same time, I really doubt that these lyrics are meant to be anything more than a vague gesture at his frame of mind: most of what Sombr sings in this song laugh in the face of meaning. “I’ve never felt anything,” he sings, “like the love from my final days,” implying that he is actually dead and we have been listening to a ghost all along. (The music video doesn’t help things by leaning into this interpretation, having the lad fall into a pool and lie in his car unconscious.) He then goes on to say that “we met at The Paris café”, and I don’t care that he’s talking about a restaurant in Manhattan, this is just a grammatical implausibility that should not be condoned.
But good Lord, are these lyrics fun to sing. The next line is, “I said, ‘Can I sit with you? Comment ça se fait?’”, and it may not make any sense in neither English nor French, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling to gasp. So is the word “compelled” in the first verse; whenever I feel the urge to murmur that line — which, in the past few months, has been almost daily — I always make sure to spit out the “p” with the most contempt I can muster. You have to be in a petulant state when you sing “12 to 12”; only then will you be able to relish every syllable, and unlock the song’s true cathartic power.
It’s not just the words, either. The lead into the chorus, where Sombr suddenly decides he wants to sing two octaves higher than before, is a delicate masterstroke. “Was it always in your plan to leave eventually? Because to me there’s no one else that could make sense to me,” he moans, and somehow that falsetto fully conveys that anguish so well, the mental pain transmuted into the physical. There’s just so much damn fun you can have singing this song: you can overload it with emotion, scream it like a man possessed, and still it won’t be enough to convey the powerful anguish within this song. It’s the sort of song that’s perfect for karaoke, and just tongue-twisty enough that your friends can have a giggle at you while you struggle to pronounce French or squeak out notes that were designed for people with a better larynx. You will not care, of course — you’re too lost in your own blissful bubble.
So that’s it then? The howlable lyrics, the turns of melody: that’s why I like this song? I’d like to say yes. But there is one moment that gives me pause: we’ve gone through two verses and a repeat of the chorus, and it’s all been goofy fun so far. Sombr might be pouring his heart out to us, but they’re all the ramblings of a naïve 19-year-old; and anyway, isn’t that him flirting with himself and Addison Rae in the music video? It’s just another simple song about heartbreak. But we come to the bridge, and the music turns despondent, the instruments fall off. Our young man ponders how he’s delusional, and how the way she acts is usual. Then the kicker: “Maybe in another world, I won’t feel so unLOVABLE!”
And it’s at this moment that I start wondering if I see more than just a good song in “12 to 12”. Do I just see it as a fun four minutes, or do I once more identify with this song? Perhaps I identify with it too much even, though I am not a lanky, slightly svelte guy who would have the courage (or, if you like, the audacity) to air my thoughts about my exes so openly. Despite my best attempts, it’s hard for me not to occasionally feel those same feelings of unlovability, those incessant invasive thoughts that the very being of myself might preclude me from a relationship ever again. For fifteen seconds, while the drumbeat skitters back up and Sombr wails into the night, I find myself following him into the darkness. Maybe I’m ignoring facts that are staring me in the face. Maybe I’m drowning myself in escapism, sitting here writing a blog about bloody pop music and generally bemoaning my circumstances, when I really should be going to therapy instead.
That lasts only for a few moments. But then the music cuts out, and he shouts — “IN A ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE I LOOK! FOR! YOU!” — and every word in that line is worth its punctuation, a mental tectonic event that cracks the ground open and sends me flying with a synth flourish and a crash of the drums. I cannot stress how wonderfully cathartic it all is: that frantic rally, that one last push in a song already full of last pushes. It is the moment that cements this song as a dead-on favourite for me, that youthful burst of vitality and emotion that reminds me why I still listen to pop music and look for mirrors of myself in every song. And yes, sometimes there are lessons which reveal themselves to me, perhaps some truths about the world, the way we think, or just myself…
… but sometimes there is no lesson to be had. Sometimes there is just a kid with a fever dream, writing emo lyrics that blot out painful memories from his mind. And sometimes there is just a slightly older young man, sitting in his bedroom and enjoying the resulting escapism. The escapism is the meaning: the four minutes of enjoyment I have had the inherent value of the song. Maybe later on I’ll come to have a more profound revelation about “12 to 12”, as meaningless as the lyrics and as basic as the music is. But it has already given me a chuffing good time, and perhaps that might be that. Not all of them have to be classics.
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 