Songfacts®:

• Matt Maeson was raised in Norfolk, Virginia by parents who played in Christian metal bands. Matt grew up performing songs for inmates at maximum-security prisons with his mother and father as part of their ministry, Life On The Verge. However, he went off the rails in his late teens, got addicted to drugs, and later served time in jail.
  
  Maeson wrote "Cringe" about being pushed away by people close to him because of the lifestyle he was living. Rather than pulling him in and loving him, he was getting reprimanded; he felt he was making these people "cringe." Maeson explained to American Songwriter: "I lived pretty rough for a while, and some of the people I really cared about would rather tell me how wrong I was rather than ask how I was doing."
• After writing the first verse and chorus, Maeson set the song aside, but sent a clip of it to his A&R guy Derek. Over the next couple of months, Derek kept hitting the singer up every week asking hum if he'd completed the song.
  
  "Finally, just to kinda shut him up, and because I really did love the sentiment of the song, I sat down and I finished it," Maeson recalled to ABC Radio. "We tracked it and put it out, and it just became my biggest song."
• "Cringe" was first released on November 25, 2016. The single slowly gathered momentum before eventually climbing to #1 on the Alternative Songs chart in August 2019. It spent four weeks on top of the tally.