sombr sits in his Los Angeles home, his floppy hair damp, alternating sips of drinks ordered from one of the city’s hotspot eateries, Joan’s on Third. The letters “LES,” referring to New York City’s Lower East Side, where he was raised as Shane Michael Boose, are tattooed on the fingers of his left hand. He’s here only briefly before leaving for Australia and New Zealand. He insists he’s not jetlagged despite having just returned from a whirlwind week in the UK. Yet the youth of teenagerhood is still apparent in his face. This, more than any of his many accomplishments of the last year, is what makes him endearing.
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It’s only been 11 months since he released his breakout hit, “back to friends”—without any fanfare—the week after Christmas 2024. After a slow but steady climb, the song topped Spotify’s global and U.S. charts. His debut album, I Barely Know Her, arrived in August and produced two more hit singles: “12 to 12” and “undressed.” He’s already started collecting awards, walking home with best alternative artist at the MTV Video Music Awards and earning a nomination for best new artist at the GRAMMYs.
“I couldn’t imagine my 17-year-old self going through this,” he says about the pace his life has taken on. “If I’d blown up as big as now when I got signed, I wouldn’t have been prepared for it. My first moment was super small, and I was able to dig back in and build my skill set and emotional maturity. I’m still not mature at all, but I’m the right amount of mature, so I don’t go insane.”
With brooding, chiseled, matinee-idol-meets-Italian-menswear-model looks plus infectious songs about love and loss, sombr is ubiquitous. Besides endless appearances on stages and broadcast media, he’s claimed a lot of real estate in style and female-geared publications with high-fashion photo spreads. His lanky frame lends itself equally to trendy loose-fitting garments and chest-baring rock ‘n’ roll attire.
As visually striking as he is, sombr is a riveting performer. He seems weightless as he skips, jumps, and dances his six-foot-plus frame during performances, his voice barely audible over audiences singing his songs back to him. His microphone rests on a round-bottomed stand, which he treats like a dance partner. His confidence was apparent early on—even if he was faking it until he made it.
A “100-percenter”—meaning he writes and at least initially performs and produces his songs himself—sombr is somewhat of a unicorn in today’s pop landscape. He dropped out of LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (the school on which the movie Fame was based) during his junior year after his self-written and recorded song “caroline,” inspired by Bon Iver’s album, For Emma, Forever Ago, went viral on TikTok overnight. He was signed to Warner Records in quick order, moved to Los Angeles, and found a creative mentor in esteemed producer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius, Taylor Swift) at his historic headquarters, Sound City.
[RELATED: 3 Quick Facts About Sombr: What To Know About the Rising Gen Z Star and MTV VMAs Nominee]
His songwriting channels Jeff Buckley, Tame Impala, Foster the People, and Cigarettes After Sex in equal measure, with a touch of Air on “12 to 12.” He says he grew up with classic rock at home and heard pop radio on his school commute, but found himself drawn to alternative-leaning crossover songs such as Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” and FTP’s “Pumped Up Kicks.” His tastes evolved to Jeff Buckley and the Velvet Underground, and he namechecks Radiohead as his favorite band.
Instead of jumping straight into recording an album, Berg introduced sombr to art, films, albums, and books. He listened to the albums—heavy emphasis on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys—but didn’t read any of the books. “It felt like homework,” he says. “I was a hater of school and had just dropped out. I was not fucking studying.”
Despite expert guidance, in the nearly three years between “caroline” and “back to friends,” sombr released almost 20 songs, none of which made a significant impact. “I was definitely discouraged,” he says. “I was signed at 17. My ego was stroked so hard. I left school. I was making a bunch of stuff and wasn’t seeing the numbers my label had hoped for, which was really hard because I was so passionate about the music. When all of a sudden you’re thrown into a commercial thing, and you’re competing, if you don’t do numbers within a certain amount of time, you get dropped. That was a big fear I definitely felt creeping in.”
Interestingly, “back to friends” was made without Berg’s production involvement. sombr created the song on his own, released it during the musically quietest week of the year, and kept posting about it on his social channels. The sentiment of the song: How can we go back to being friends / When we just shared a bed? / How can you look at me and pretend / I’m someone you’ve never met? struck a chord with listeners.
“Everything before ‘back to friends’ was me making what I thought people wanted to hear, or what I thought would work,” says sombr. “That just wasn’t the truth. It’s a mind fuck having your passion become a job. ‘back to friends’ was when I got past that and said, ‘I’m going to make what I feel like making.’”
Wholly self-taught thanks to YouTube tutorials, his home writing setup revolves around Logic (he started on GarageBand in middle school and upgraded by high school) on a Mac, outboard synths, a MIDI keyboard, an $800 microphone and an upright piano—not dissimilar to the one he grew up with, part of his musician father’s instrument collection which also included guitars.
He begins with four to eight bars of a beat, then either picks up a guitar or sits at the piano. He riffs over that, and if nothing comes immediately, he drops what he has and starts fresh. It’s rare that he returns to something he’s scrapped—’back to friends’ being one of the exceptions, where the chorus ended up completely different than the original.
Before he brings a song to Berg, sombr completes it at home, alone, the only way he can be truly vulnerable. He writes the lyrics, plays all the instrument parts, records the vocals, and produces everything himself. He then presents the song to Berg for input, textures, potentially other musicians playing on them, and further production.
“When I first started going to Sound City, I thought I was the shit, but I was not,” he recalls. “Tony’s really good at determining what’s good and what’s bad. He would tell me, ‘This is bad,’ or ‘This needs a bridge,’ or ‘This needs a better second verse.’ Now, every time I write a song at home, I want to impress Tony. I don’t want him to have notes. I don’t want to bring anything other than a song better than the song I brought the last time. He really pushed me in that way. I have high standards for myself. I want to grow a lot more as a writer and producer.”
Whether on older or newer songs, sombr often heavily distorts his voice—a creative choice he defends, saying, “It’s how I want to hear my voice. Having a voice distorted is really powerful, but it all depends on what I’m trying to portray. A lot of times on my verses, I couldn’t show enough emotion in my voice, not because I don’t have enough emotion, but because I gave everything I have in my voice, but I want to push it a little bit further with the distortion, trying to break through and hitting a ceiling. When I get to a chorus, generally, it’ll switch to a group of layered voices that are not distorted. That yin and yang, I find to be really incredible, and it’s my sound.”
sombr says his early songs were about becoming an adult and trying to find his way, and he admits he was depressed: “My whole life I’ve dealt with some aspect of that, and I was trying to figure it out, still figuring it out,” but he concedes that “the best songs are love songs or heartbreak songs.” Still, he says, “A big goal of mine is to write about stuff that isn’t love or heartbreak. It’s obviously hard because that’s what I experienced as a young man. That is my life. That’s what I care about. I want to keep doing that because it’s true to me, but I also want to figure out how to challenge myself and write about other things.”
While he hasn’t delved into the making of his next album yet, sombr’s life looks and feels a lot different from when he was working on I Barely Know Her. “To be honest, my world has lost its innocence,” he says. “Everything is a much more real now and feels like work. I want to make a project without anything in mind. I want to do more of what I want.”
With sombr’s personal perspective in his songs and his organic rise, there’s hope that more artists will believe in themselves to create from a singular place and trust that their audience will find them. “I want to hear what more individuals have to say, rather than groups of songwriters—not to knock that, that’s its own art, and I want to keep hearing that,” says sombr. “But I think the world needs more individuals in music.”
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