Yves Tumor has responded after being booed off stage at a Swedish House Mafia show in New York, calling the crowd “the corniest people I’ve ever seen”.
The experimental musician and producer opened for the house group at NYC’s Arthur Ashe Stadium last night (September 11), and, according to Stereogum, delivered a badly received DJ set at the gig.
Taking to Instagram Stories afterwards, Tumor (real name Sean Lee Bowie) said: “If anybody’s curious how the show went: I just got booed offstage for playing the best set of the night by a bunch of the corniest people I’ve ever seen in my fucking life.”
The video also saw him destroying a poster of New York City. “This city is truly hell on earth,” he told viewers. “I thought LA was bad. I thought Berlin was bad. I thought Paris was bad. Berlin is definitely worse, but fuck!”
He went on to say that he was going to “take it out on” the NYC poster. He captioned the clip: “shout out Irish house mafia.”
Yves Tumor was born in Miami, Florida, and is currently based in Turin, Italy.
The opener for Swedish House Mafia’s show in New York, Yves Tumor, was apparently booed out of the building and is currently crashing out on IG over what happened tonight. pic.twitter.com/TznSjf8aDl
— GDE (@GlobalDanceGDE) September 12, 2025
Someone on X/Twitter hit out at the artist’s decision to play “hard techno and rock music” while opening for “progressive house DJs”.
Since uploading his video message, Tumor has shared some screenshots of negative DMs and comments from Swedish House Mafia fans.
“These sub humans are already spamming my comments,” he wrote. “That’s how much they loved it, they had that much energy to search me. I truly love my stalkers. Anyone wanna guess what they look like?”
Tumor went on to post numerous messages. When one person asked “What’s the genre called?”, he replied: “Blatant racism.” Someone else seemingly messaged Swedish House Mafia to say: “[I don’t know] who the fuck you got opening but they’re some hot ass.”
Swedish House Mafia have not commented on the controversy. They became the first electronic/dance headliner at the 23,000-capacity Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens last night.
YVES TUMOR HAD THE CHUTZPAH TO SAY WE HAVE BAD TASTE IN MUSIC. BROTHER, YOU ARE OPENING FOR PROGRESSIVE HOUSE DJS AND YOURE PLAYING HARD TECHNO AND ROCK MUSIC
— Hardwell New York (@HardwellNewYork) September 12, 2025
Over the summer, Tumor teamed up with Bar Italia’s NINA on a collaborative song called ‘WE DONT COUNT’.
The song marked the first new release from Yves Tumor since his fifth studio album, 2023’s ‘Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)’.
In a four-star review of the latter, NME wrote: “‘Praise…’ is evidence of how brilliant rock can be when ambition and talent are met with a creative who isn’t afraid to be strange.
“It’s an album that could have easily ventured too out-there for the masses to find it palpable, but thanks Tumor’s outsized talent and personality, ‘Praise…’ avoids decadence and proves richly satisfying.”
