Sombr’s Funny Feelings

Sombr is playing a little game of show and tell. He reaches into a bag and pulls out some beige leather loafers and holds them up to the camera. “They’re vintage Diesel. They’re pretty dope,” he says, rotating the shoes so I can get a full 360 look — before mock-confessing a rock star problem of the highest order: “I don’t know how to tie my shoes, so I need Velcro.”

He picked them up earlier in the day at a vintage store in Barcelona, where he’s video-chatting from his green room before a show. Instead of just bouncing from hotel to venue, Sombr, the stage name of Shane Michael Boose, is trying to make a habit of actually seeing the cities he’s playing: finding a cool coffee shop, doing a little shopping, having a “nice brunch” before heading to the venue. He’s about to perform his VIP soundcheck, the nightly pre-show experience where he does a Q&A with fans and plays a song not on his usual setlist, and he’s been practicing his español.

“¡Gracias por la oportunidad!” he says without a hint of self-consciousness. “I’m good at accents.” He just got here from Milan. He’s headed to Paris next.

“Ciao, bella! Grazie mille!” he says. “Je m’appelle Sombr. Bonjour. Je t’aime… I have it all!”

Indeed: Few artists have the world in the cup of their hands right now like Sombr, the 20-year-old rock star who’s got more passport stamps than he can comprehend and still squares off with his laces; who’s got the lanky frame and messy curls of a member of The Strokes circa 2001 but also radio hits as irresistible as any pop girlie’s; who will sing songs of devastating heartbreak while dressed, usually sans shirt, in a sparkling suit that even John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever might consider too much. And he’s loving it. “This feels like a simulation,” he says, pausing between his words like he’s struggling to find the right ones. “Even over a year ago, I was a signed artist, but no one knew who I was. Being a small fish in that huge pool, even then, it felt impossible — and you see everyone in L.A. trying to do it. I was like, ‘Bro, I’m never going to have a hit.’”

Now, he’s got several: the disco strut of “12 to 12,” the melancholy surf-rock of “Undressed,” the last-call breakup elegy “Back to Friends.” They’re all from his debut album, I Barely Know Her, which arrived last summer and earned him a Best New Artist nomination at this year’s Grammys. In what feels like a blink, Sombr’s brooding melodies and pining lyrics catapulted him from an if-you-know-you-know artist to a full-fledged teen heartthrob; anyone worried about the stereotype of the emotionally repressed Gen Z male can let out a sigh of relief thanks to songs like “Canal Street,” about the agony of trying to replace an ex (named after the New York City hot spot for knockoff designer goods): “I try to go on dates / But none of them are you,” he sings. “I look for girls with your traits / But none of them are you.”

“Everyone always puts artists on these pedestals. I’m just a normal motherf*cker. I’m a little too normal.”

That heart-forward storytelling quickly won over some high-profile listeners. Taylor Swift called Sombr “amazing” in a recent interview, and he’s still not over the acknowledgement. “I really respect everything she’s done,” he tells me, hailing her as “the queen.” On his last U.S. tour, he brought out special guests like Sam Smith, jazz phenom Laufey, and — perhaps most exciting to him — Greg Gonzalez, mastermind of the dream-pop act Cigarettes After Sex. “There was a point in high school where I would tell people my favorite artist was Cigarettes After Sex,” Sombr says. “There’s nothing like being able to collaborate with an artist I grew up on.”

His music video roster is equally stacked. He cast Quen Blackwell and Milo Manheim to round out the love triangle for “Homewrecker” — “I’ve never clicked with people so fast. It feels like in school when I would have a trio of inseparable friends,” he says of his co-stars — and counts his fellow Best New Artist nominee Addison Rae as a pal after she played his love interest in the video for “12 to 12.”

“It’s cool to be able to share those moments with people that you genuinely are a fan of,” Sombr says. He likes that stardom today, at least for new artists, doesn’t feel competitive — in fact, it feels to him like everyone’s rooting for each other. “I will always be a supporter of anyone who’s putting themselves out there and doing their thing and making art.” He grins: “I’ll always be a supporter. Let’s just say if I’m ever involved in a beef, I didn’t start it!”

“Even if some people found it cringe, it’s cringe until you win.”

No one on his team predicted how quickly this level of success would come. Tonight’s show is at the Sant Jordi Club, a 4,600-person venue he booked last fall but likely outgrew sometime between making his television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in May (with a performance full of yearning close-ups) and playing Saturday Night Live in November (where he high-kicked across Studio 8H and climbed the scaffolding). They’ve tried to upgrade as many venues as possible across Europe; the day before our chat, he played a crowd nearly three times the size of tonight’s at an arena in Madrid. And your chances of seeing him in a club-sized venue are sure to drop after he performs at Coachella this month. He won’t give away the surprises, but he’s going all-in on production. “I’m not making money from this Coachella set, I’m spending money on it,” he teases.

His biggest pinch-me moment thus far was attending the 2026 Grammys, where he closed out the Best New Artist mega-medley and descended from the rafters dressed like a shining disco ball. “It was the craziest day of my life,” he says. “I never thought I would get there.”

“I’m still a man that feels emotions. I’m still very single. And I still deal with some issues that have to do with love.”

The weekend was a flash of red carpets and run-ins with Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, and Tyler, The Creator. The blur of the evening didn’t come into focus until later in the show, during the moving all-star tribute to D’Angelo and Roberta Flack. “I just started bawling in my mother’s arms,” he remembers. “It was like, ‘Damn, I’m really here, and I’m not a spectator. I’m down here on the floor. I’m one of the artists.’ That was just a crazy realization because everything moves so fast, and it’s hard to let things sink in.”

The magnitude of the moment has stuck with him. “That’s something they can never take away from me: I will always be a Grammy nominee,” he continues. “And I am someone who would have been happy doing anything creative as a job, as long as I could get by. There was no f*cking possibility that I could be a successful artist. You are told it’s one in a million. It truly is.”

OK, maybe it wasn’t so unlikely that Sombr would turn out to be a major-label hitmaker. He grew up on the Lower East Side — you know, that storied stomping ground of rock stars past — and learned how to play guitar from his dad, Andy, a successful event producer who’s played in a number of indie bands and is also part of Sombr’s behind-the-scenes team. Spend a few minutes digging around the internet, and you can find photos and videos of the elder Boose performing and realize how close the apple falls from the tree. Or you can poke around on TikTok and find clips of a young Sombr, towering over his classmates, performing in a youth theater production of Seussical Jr. and realize this guy was inevitably going to find the stage.

Sombr attended the famed LaGuardia performing arts high school — alma mater of Timothée Chalamet, Lola Tung, and Grace Van Patten — and began releasing music online at age 13 under the name Cherry Valley, which some sleuthing fans uncovered a few months into his rise. (You know you’ve made it when the stans start combing your internet presence — just ask Heated Rivalry star and former teen YouTube vlogger Connor Storrie.) “Look, I don’t know how the f*ck y’all found that, but the kid who made that project is definitely a very happy boy right now because all he wanted was a couple listeners,” he says. “He would be really happy right now, knowing that. Although the music is really bad, he would be happy knowing that people are finally listening to it.”

“My sister’s still going to be a f*cking asshole to me, and my mom’s still going to be telling me to do a chore. That will never change.”

And it didn’t take long for him to get good. While still a student, he adopted the moniker Sombr — a play on his initials, SMB — and released “Caroline,” a raw, wistful tune that picked up enough momentum on TikTok that labels started calling. In early 2023, he signed to Warner Records, which paired him with Tony Berg — the legendary producer who worked on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Bette Midler projects in the ’70s but is now better known to Gen Z as a close collaborator of Phoebe Bridgers. At the time, Sombr was dealing with the fallout of his first major heartbreak, the kind of relationship that feels like you’re falling off of a cliff, and I Barely Know Her’s 10 tracks loosely chronicle its full lifespan. (Yes, the title both captures the feeling of post-breakup estrangement and manages to be a dad-joke-y answer to his artist name.) “It was just pouring it all out,” Sombr says. “It all came out around the same time, and I was just in a flow state.”

“Back to Friends” dropped in December of 2024, and within six months Sombr was topping the charts at alternative radio — the first of several No. 1s to his name. He fueled that momentum with relentless (mostly) self-aware promo, making “a million f*cking TikToks every week,” he says. “Even if some people found it cringe, it’s cringe until you win.”

On TikTok, Sombr is dedicated to being unserious. When Charlie Puth commented on his post, he replied and thanked Charli XCX instead. He shot his shot (with a real basketball) at Tate McRae after she used his song on her Instagram story. He has a whole shtick about pretending to be 6-foot-7 (he’s only off by a few inches). During his stop in France, he appeared to serenade the Mona Lisa with a lip-sync to “Homewrecker.” Instead of working against the self-seriousness of his music, his wry, hyper-online sense of humor was the perfect companion. “Everyone always puts artists on these pedestals. It’s like, ‘Bro, I’m just like y’all. I’m just a normal motherf*cker,’” he says. “I’m a little too normal.”

Still, with more eyes on him than ever, he’s aware of how easy it is for a joke to fail to translate. That’s another rite of passage for a young star: realizing you can’t talk to your (rapidly growing) audience quite the way you used to. He’s still after laughs online — he has another TikTok account, @sombrsucks, whose bio reads “this page is for the girlies that get it… if you don’t, scroll!” — but he says he’s trying to tone it down and leave more of the silly posts to his digital team. “Now I’m so scared,” he jokes. “Now I try to do a prank with another artist or something, and there’ll be a TMZ article about it, I have to hear from my publicist, and it’s just… not the same anymore.”

A few weeks before leaving for Europe, Sombr made a dinner reservation for two in Los Angeles that served as a stark reminder of his new reality.

“It was a restaurant where all the tables are super close. The minute I sat down, there was a whole table of girls next to me. And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, Sombr, we went to your show in LA,’” he says. “I was like, ‘I love you guys so much, but I’m meeting someone, and I have to move to a different table.’ I sent them a bottle of wine because I felt so f*cking awful, but I just had to.” (He won’t say if it was a date, though he later shares, “I’m still a man that feels emotions. I’m still very single. And I still deal with some issues that have to do with love.”)

“I just have to accept that I don’t have privacy,” he continues, “which is not something I’ll ever complain about because this is what I wanted. But I have to always act like I’m always being watched. Because I am.”

This perhaps explains why a young star like him might actually enjoy the close watch of his dad-ager and mom, who try to be at as many shows as possible. “They’re really the only people in the world that I can look at and be like, ‘You guys aren’t going to treat me any differently,’” he says. “My sister’s still going to be a f*cking asshole to me, and my mom’s still going to be telling me to do a chore. That will never change.”

He’s trying not to mess with his creative process, either, as he works on his next album. So far, he says, the material draws influence from the Beatles and the Beach Boys with complex bridges and chord changes, mixed with a dash of “nostalgic 2010s pop.” “I’m staying true to my style, but I’m definitely exploring,” he says. “And if the album flops, f*ck it. As long as I am happy with what I made.”

“I’m not making money from this Coachella set, I’m spending money on it.”

Flopping is unlikely: In February, he released “Homewrecker,” his poppiest song to date about feeling the spark again with an ex (despite their new partner) that marked a best-yet debut on the charts. In his lyrics, Sombr is mostly respectful of the other man in the picture; in conversation, he is less so. “I was like, ‘Bro I can be so much better than this fool,’” he says of his inspiration. And, apparently, the real-life subject of the song is not a fan: “Apparently he’s f*cking pissed. He’s mad. Hopefully, he doesn’t come f*cking kill me.”

It’s one of a few moments in our conversation where you can’t quite tell if he’s being serious. A few days after our chat, at the 2026 BRIT Awards, a man rushed the stage and gave Sombr a shove mid-performance. Though it was clearly staged — the guy was wearing a “Sombr is a homewrecker” T-shirt, after all — Sombr kept the ruse up online in TikToks, posting videos with text like “i’m pretty sure the guy that just rushed the stage during my performance is the boyfriend of the girl that this song is about” and “someone crashed my performance at the brits so I made the shirt he wore into merch.” The man is, for better or worse, committed to the bit.

But maybe that’s all just cover for something a little sweeter. When I ask him where he sees himself in 10 years, his answer is simple. “Doing the exact same thing: making music because that’s what I love,” he says. For all the Zoomer humor that surrounds his art, he is endearingly, almost painfully earnest about what it feels like to be living your dream. So what else does he want out of his 2026? “Number one, a wife,” he says, counting on his fingers. “Number two, being able to collaborate with peers that I look up to... And number three, be on the cover of NYLON.”

Top image credit: Valentino clothing and necklace