Again in August, the 20-year-old Shane Boose of Sombr threw his file launch social gathering on the patio of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. Sombr’s debut album, “I Barely Know Her,” wouldn’t be out for just a few days but, however below the patio’s twinkling fairy lights, he was already sweating the numbers a bit.
“Please go stream the album,” the lanky, severely-cheekboned Boose requested to a packed crowd of lissome, 20-something influencers and besuited trade sorts. “I really need to pay back this advance.”
He shouldn’t have burdened. After Boose cruised via “12 to 12,” Sombr’s urbane, disco-funky single, Boose leaped into the resort’s turquoise pool. Quickly his backing band joined him, soaked after a sizzling evening of anticipation as the most popular new rock act within the nation.
As rowdy habits on the Chateau goes, it wasn’t fairly Billy Idol stripping nude and trashing his room for need of extra tequila. However it did really feel like a callback to an incandescent period — a younger band having fun with its spoils at L.A.’s most notorious social gathering palace.
“I had just landed from Japan the night before and I was exhausted,” Boose mentioned the following month, talking on Zoom from Nashville after rehearsals for his present tour. “The pool thing was completely unplanned. I didn’t know that my band was gonna follow me in. It was one of those rare times when I’m not so stressed about this career. I just felt like I was finally enjoying it and just living.”
Sombr is a uncommon rock venture in 2025: indebted to high-panache indie with an arch wit and actual feeling, however working up the Sizzling 100 like a TikTok breakout. With a quickly-scaled-up three-night-stand in L.A. in two weeks previewing a significant Coachella date subsequent 12 months, the pleasures of being — and the expectations on — Sombr are already formidable.
“Yeah, it’s scary,” Boose mentioned. “I thought there was no possibility that I could ever have a hit song. I was making alternative rock inspired by people that I’m inspired by, and then it became what it is. I try to stay offline and just stay in the music. The last thing I want is for people’s opinions, or me being in the public eye, to affect the art I’m creating.”
“I actually think I perform better the bigger the crowd,” Boose mentioned. “It’s weird that I’m less afraid the more people there are.”
(Evelyn Freja/For The Occasions)
When Boose calls in to talk post-rehearsal, he’s nonetheless wrapping his head across the scale of the tour forward of him, which is able to embody two nights (Oct.28-29) on the 5,000-capacity Shrine Expo Corridor with a bonus evening in early November on the Fonda Theatre for good measure — arena-caliber numbers. On-line and onstage, he’s bitingly humorous, roasting the matcha-sipping, Clairo-stanning performative-male stereotypes of his technology of softbois, whereas additionally dancing with a low-buttoned, Bowie-worthy swish on the MTV Video Music Awards.
“I actually think I perform better the bigger the crowd,” he mentioned. “There’s always something awkward about the 300- to 500-capacity venues because you can see everyone’s facial expression. That makes it a lot more nerve-racking. It’s weird that I’m less afraid the more people there are.”
By that measure, Sombr was virtually born to be the Gen Z rock breakout in 2025. Boose, a local of New York Metropolis’s Decrease East Aspect, was raised by occasion planner and PR trade mother and father who labored with Elton John’s AIDS Basis and the nonprofit amfAR. He attended LaGuardia Excessive Faculty, house of alums like Timothée Chalamet and Nicki Minaj, however dropped out and moved to L.A. as soon as Sombr took off in his teenagers with the spare and craving single “Caroline.”
With a metropolis child’s gimlet-eyed savvy (and, it have to be mentioned, genetic-Powerball-winner attractiveness), Boose was seemingly certain for stardom at one factor or one other. However on his data, even his self-produced early ones, there’s a literary poise and dreamy loucheness that calls again to the imperious, wounded singers of his previous neighborhood — the Strokes and Jeff Buckley specifically.
“I just saw that documentary ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,’ and I was bawling,” Boose mentioned. “‘Grace’ is my favorite record, but I expected him to be playing to way bigger crowds. It seems like he’s gotten bigger since he died. I’ve never cried from a movie in my life, but that one had me in tears.”
Sombr’s ageless songs equally might have taken off in any period; they only occurred to reach in a single the place hundreds of thousands of younger individuals might watch him on TikTok at 18, wistfully staring down the digital camera from the again of a convertible within the amber L.A. magic hour on “Weak.”
That blend of sultry pop charisma and sturdier, affecting songwriting is what drew Warner Information to signal him in 2023. Was this venture bleary, distortion-fried indie-rock with a sure moon-eyed Babygirl attraction? Is Boose a nascent pop star who’d actually reasonably be honing his pedalboard?
“I think there’s a yearning for music with real instruments from real studios, with an intro, verse, chorus, prechorus and a real bridge. All those elements that the classics have that are not really present today in most pop,” Boose mentioned.
(Evelyn Freja/For The Occasions)
“Shane has as much talent as I’ve ever seen in an artist, but I don’t really think about where he stands in relation to anyone else,” mentioned Chris Morris, a senior vp of A&R at Warner Information. “He clearly reveres his influences, but what he’s creating is entirely his own — unique to his process and perspective. I can only hope his music has the ability to impact his listeners the way that ‘Grace’ or ‘Is This It’ did for their generations.”
Underneath Warner, he paired with producer Tony Berg (of Phoebe Bridgers and Boygenius fame) to seek out his footing musically in a famously tempting city for a younger man on the rise.
“I moved out to L.A. right when I turned 18 when I got signed. I was supposed to be doing music, but I was going out with my buddies, like, five nights a week,” Boose mentioned. “I was like, ‘Damn, I’m becoming a f— loser. Something just clicked in me at one point, and I got it together and stopped going out while all my friends still were. My only focus was on music all the time.”
That head-down work ethic paid off on singles like “Back to Friends” and “Undressed,” which landed in winter and spring with a preternatural talent for hooks and emotional heft. “Back to Friends” — a mid-tempo piano brooder, in regards to the liminal post-hookup state between platonic and never — is viciously hummable, punctured with dramatic falsettos. “Undressed” is tender and pained in its refrain — “I don’t want to get undressed for a new person all over again,” he sings, earlier than the shockingly mature and mournful confession on the bridge — “I don’t want the children of another man / To have the eyes of a girl I won’t forget.”
“I think there’s a yearning for music with real instruments from real studios, with an intro, verse, chorus, prechorus and a real bridge. All those elements that the classics have that are not really present today in most pop,” Boose mentioned.
Touchdown two in a row helped him lose the jitters that he merely received fortunate as soon as. “I was like, OK, that’s two hits in the span of a few months; I’m good for a bit,” he mentioned, laughing. “Definitely skipped the one-hit wonder thing pretty quick, which was a big fear of mine.”
“Shane has as much talent as I’ve ever seen in an artist, but I don’t really think about where he stands in relation to anyone else,” mentioned Chris Morris, a senior vp of A&R at Warner Information. “He clearly reveres his influences, but what he’s creating is entirely his own. I can only hope his music has the ability to impact his listeners the way that ‘Grace’ or ‘Is This It’ did for their generations.”
(Evelyn Freja/For The Occasions)
Nationwide fame got here rapidly thereafter. “His TV debut on Jimmy Fallon was really special. Performing live in front of a national TV audience for the first time is not easy, but he crushed it,” mentioned Sean Stevens, one other senior vp of A&R at Warner. “We were all standing off to the side, his family, his team and a few of us from the label, and it was like watching him become a superstar in real time. We were elated. He was elated. And we knew he was ready.”
“Back to Friends” certainly hit No. 22, whereas “Undressed” peaked at 16. On the energy of these two singles, “I Barely Know Her” was good for a No. 10 debut on the album charts. For a technology slandered as sexless and terminally stilted, Sombr has accomplished a tough trick — imbued indie rock with a generationally recent, fully-articulated sense of younger male need and ran it up the pop charts.
Deeper album cuts like “We Never Dated” can name again to Bonnie Raitt (“I can’t make you love me / No, I can’t make you love me”), or fire up some Frank O’Hara vibes on “Canal Street” (“This time last year I was putting up a tree in your place … I’m still smoking cigarettes on my couch / And it kills my mom, but it brings me back to you.”) Even on “12 to 12,” simply essentially the most overtly pop single in his catalog, there’s a hand-crafted sizzle atop its four-on-the-floor thump, one which harkens again to Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” or Bowie and Nile Rodgers’ “Let’s Dance.” Addison Rae — the Major Pop Lady success story of the 12 months to this point — dropped in for a bedroom-eyed star flip dancing in its music video. However the music already feels destined for wedding ceremony dance flooring a long time from now.
“I love Addison, man. She’s amazing,” Boose mentioned. “Working with her made me realize how grateful I am to be able to call up insanely talented people and create art that can live forever with them over, like, a weekend.”
The 2 will cross paths at Coachella subsequent 12 months, when each younger stars are booked second-line on Saturday. “I haven’t been to Coachella, but it’s on my Mt. Rushmore. Actually the only music festival I’ve ever been to is the one I just played in Japan,” Boose mentioned. What a visit to be a 20-year-old New York rocker seeing your identify on equal Coachella footing with the Strokes, Interpol and David Byrne.
However precise fame for Sombr — the invasive, always-on-edge, you’re-being-watched variety — is the one factor Boose hasn’t gotten used to. Out in L.A., he’s exhausting to overlook — even when he wasn’t a rock star, you’d assume he was one if you happen to handed him on the Erewhon smoothie bar. Whereas he’s cuttingly humorous about his personal persona on his social media, he admits the tradition of contemporary fame is nerve-racking and may poison the properly for each songwriting and being your greatest self.
“I wasn’t prepared,” Boose mentioned. “Being a public figure, while I love it and I’m so grateful, I’d say my weakest and most vulnerable points, and when I’m the worst person is all related to that.
(Evelyn Freja/For The Times)
“I haven’t adjusted,” Boose admitted. “I wasn’t prepared. Being a public figure, while I love it and I’m so grateful, I’d say my weakest and most vulnerable points, and when I’m the worst person is all related to that. I’m super lucky, but all the worst points of my life over the past six to eight months have been because it’s f— hard being put under a microscope. But it’s like the one negative in a world of so many positives. So I’m dealing with it.”
“This thing impacts people differently and it can change hour by hour,” Stevens mentioned. “You never know what it’s going to mean for someone until it starts to happen. What I do know is Shane is wise beyond his years and has an amazing support system to help carry him through all of it. He has an incredible family, a devoted team and a label that cares as deeply about his well-being as it does his career.”
Boose is coping with it by throwing himself again into writing for Album 2. As a substitute of going out, he’s armed the tour bus with a recording studio to doc this new part of life amidst the pains of quick stardom. When he performs these teenage singles like “Caroline,” he does so now from a fond distance, one which he can’t fairly relate to even only a few years later.
“There’s songs that I just f— hate, not because I was trying to put out lazy work, but because I was 16,” Boose mentioned. “The music that I’m making now has that feeling times 10.”
“I can’t put a pin on why it’s happening,” he added, wryly acknowledging that his view, for now, is trying up from the pool on the Chateau. “Something about all my dreams coming true, you know, it’s working for me.”
