Back in August, the 20-year-old Shane Boose of Sombr threw his record release party on the patio of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. Sombr’s debut album, “I Barely Know Her,” wouldn’t be out for a few days yet, but under the patio’s twinkling fairy lights, he was already sweating the numbers a bit.
“Please go stream the album,” the lanky, severely-cheekboned Boose asked to a packed crowd of lissome, 20-something influencers and besuited industry types. “I really need to pay back this advance.”
He shouldn’t have stressed. After Boose cruised through “12 to 12,” Sombr’s urbane, disco-funky single, Boose leaped into the hotel’s turquoise pool. Soon his backing band joined him, soaked after a hot night of anticipation as the hottest new rock act in the country.
As rowdy behavior at the Chateau goes, it wasn’t quite Billy Idol stripping nude and trashing his room for want of more tequila. But it did feel like a callback to an incandescent era — a young band enjoying its spoils at L.A.’s most infamous party palace.
“I had just landed from Japan the night before and I was exhausted,” Boose said the next month, speaking on Zoom from Nashville after rehearsals for his current 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 rare rock project in 2025: indebted to high-panache indie with an arch wit and real feeling, but running up the Hot 100 like a TikTok breakout. With a quickly-scaled-up three-night-stand in L.A. in two weeks previewing a major Coachella date next year, the pleasures of being — and the expectations on — Sombr are already formidable.
“Yeah, it’s scary,” Boose said. “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.”
When Boose calls in to chat post-rehearsal, he’s still wrapping his head around the scale of the tour ahead of him, which will include two nights (Oct.28-29) at the 5,000-capacity Shrine Expo Hall with a bonus night in early November at the Fonda Theatre for good measure — arena-caliber numbers. Online and onstage, he’s bitingly funny, roasting the matcha-sipping, Clairo-stanning performative-male stereotypes of his generation of softbois, while also dancing with a low-buttoned, Bowie-worthy swish at the MTV Video Music Awards.
“I actually think I perform better the bigger the crowd,” he said. “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 practically born to be the Gen Z rock breakout in 2025. Boose, a native of New York City’s Lower East Side, was raised by event planner and PR industry parents who worked with Elton John’s AIDS Foundation and the nonprofit amfAR. He attended LaGuardia High School, home of alums like Timothée Chalamet and Nicki Minaj, but dropped out and moved to L.A. once Sombr took off in his teens with the spare and yearning single “Caroline.”
With a city kid’s gimlet-eyed savvy (and, it must be said, genetic-Powerball-winner good looks), Boose was likely bound for stardom at one thing or another. But on his records, even his self-produced early ones, there’s a literary poise and dreamy loucheness that calls back to the imperious, wounded singers of his old neighborhood — the Strokes and Jeff Buckley in particular.
“I just saw that documentary ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,’ and I was bawling,” Boose said. “‘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 similarly could have taken off in any era; they just happened to arrive in one where millions of young people could watch him on TikTok at 18, wistfully staring down the camera from the back of a convertible in the amber L.A. magic hour on “Weak.”
That mix of sultry pop charisma and sturdier, affecting songwriting is what drew Warner Records to sign him in 2023. Was this project bleary, distortion-fried indie-rock with a certain moon-eyed Babygirl appeal? Is Boose a nascent pop star who’d really rather be honing his pedalboard?
“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,” said Chris Morris, a senior vice president of A&R at Warner Records. “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.”
Under Warner, he paired with producer Tony Berg (of Phoebe Bridgers and Boygenius fame) to find his footing musically in a famously tempting town for a young 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 said. “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 skill for hooks and emotional heft. “Back to Friends” — a mid-tempo piano brooder, about the liminal post-hookup state between platonic and not — is viciously hummable, punctured with dramatic falsettos. “Undressed” is tender and pained in its chorus — “I don’t want to get undressed for a new person all over again,” he sings, before the shockingly mature and mournful confession at 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 said.
Landing two in a row helped him lose the jitters that he merely got lucky once. “I was like, OK, that’s two hits in the span of a few months; I’m good for a bit,” he said, laughing. “Definitely skipped the one-hit wonder thing pretty quick, which was a big fear of mine.”
National fame came quickly 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,” said Sean Stevens, another senior vice president 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” indeed hit No. 22, while “Undressed” peaked at 16. On the strength of those two singles, “I Barely Know Her” was good for a No. 10 debut on the album charts. For a generation slandered as sexless and terminally stilted, Sombr has done a hard trick — imbued indie rock with a generationally fresh, fully-articulated sense of young male desire and ran it up the pop charts.
Deeper album cuts like “We Never Dated” can call back to Bonnie Raitt (“I can’t make you love me / No, I can’t make you love me”), or stir 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,” easily the most overtly pop single in his catalog, there’s a handmade sizzle atop its four-on-the-floor thump, one that harkens back to Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” or Bowie and Nile Rodgers’ “Let’s Dance.” Addison Rae — the Main Pop Girl success story of the year so far — dropped in for a bedroom-eyed star turn dancing in its music video. But the song already feels destined for wedding dance floors decades from now.
“I love Addison, man. She’s amazing,” Boose said. “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 two will cross paths at Coachella next year, when both young 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 said. What a trip to be a 20-year-old New York rocker seeing your name on equal Coachella footing with the Strokes, Interpol and David Byrne.
But actual fame for Sombr — the invasive, always-on-edge, you’re-being-watched kind — is the one thing Boose hasn’t gotten used to. Out in L.A., he’s hard to miss — even if he wasn’t a rock star, you’d assume he was one if you passed him at the Erewhon smoothie bar. While he’s cuttingly funny about his own persona on his social media, he admits the culture of modern fame is nerve-racking and can poison the well for both songwriting and being your best self.
“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 said. “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 dealing with it by throwing himself back into writing for Album 2. Instead of going out, he’s armed the tour bus with a recording studio to document this new phase of life amidst the rigors of fast stardom. When he plays those teenage singles like “Caroline,” he does so now from a fond distance, one that he can’t quite relate to even just 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 said. “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 looking up from the pool at the Chateau. “Something about all my dreams coming true, you know, it’s working for me.”
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