written by DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography BRYCE ANDERSON
styling ALEXANDER PICON
The walls of the Chateau Marmont throb with rock history. For decades, it’s been the site of debauchery and legend—where, apparently, Jim Morrison hung from its windows and Led Zeppelin rode motorcycles through the lobby. Where, for the most part, every star’s secrets are kept. If you consider yourself a musician, you must enter knowing you’re becoming a part of its lore. And so that’s what 20-year-old Shane Michael Boose does on a scorching Saturday afternoon in early August. Wearing wayfarer shades, billowing slacks, and a striped shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, he snakes through the tables, past waiters and turned heads, and shakes my hand. A pendant hangs from his neck of a dragon curved into an ’S’. The same symbol is tattooed on his wrist too. To most of the world, this hot waif of a man is known as Sombr. His life has changed drastically in the last six months, so much so that to be in this holy, canopied courtyard is barely novel to him. There are other things, though, that he’s still making sense of.
Like the fact that his debut album should probably be finished by now. “Shit man,” he says, from behind the shield of his sunglasses. “It’s really crazy. I don’t have a title. I don’t have a sequence. I don’t have a cover—and it’s due Monday.”
top gucci, necklace sombr’s own
Those details would come: I Barely Know Her, his 10-track debut album, was officially announced last week. It arrives on Friday. Getting to grips with its making has been a tricky task. He’s been working on it for months, subconsciously for longer. But that time period has also been the time during which he’s become a bonafide star: He made his late night debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in May, sat front row at Saint Laurent’s Spring 2026 menswear show in June, and last month, cast pop heroine Addison Rae as his girl in the video for his latest single, “12 to 12.” Check out his TikTok (125 million likes), and you’ll see someone with an intuitive understanding of the internet but with a face and sonic style from the ’70s, alluring and classic. His rolodex of references—Jeff Buckley, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—align with that too. He’s our answer to the question: What if the rockstars of yore knew how to dice with viral attention—and use it to meet with those listening on their level?
It came to him unexpectedly at first. In the summer of 2022, Sombr, then a 17-year-old student at New York’s LaGuardia High School, had been releasing his own moody, sometimes shoegaze-y alt-pop tracks into the ether. Then, just like all of the tracks that preceded it, he posted “Caroline” online, a track about an old flame. In hours, it started to blow up on TikTok. Record labels were DMing him on Instagram (he’s now signed to Warner Records), and he was forced to reckon with the fact that his childhood pipe dream had become a reality.
“Is my mind going insane, or are people gonna like this?”
sombr
What followed was that same process, toiling away at his life to make songs from it. He moved to Los Angeles and, in the late summer of 2023, released the EP in another life. Then, in the nothing week between Christmas and New Year’s of 2024, Sombr felt like he had something special. On December 27, he released “Back to Friends,” a song he wrote and produced by himself, about the fucked-up feeling of realizing a relationship is over. It was quiet at first, then, once again, TikTok caught it, and by the time spring came around, it was a top 10 hit in countries across Europe, and reached number one on North America’s Alternative radio chart faster than any other new artist in a decade. It’s since been streamed over 600 million times. Not long after, his track “Undressed,” a song so impassioned Sombr almost wails his feelings, experienced an almost identical fate.
“Is my mind going insane, or are people gonna like this?” Sombr is describing the kindling of songwriting, stirring almond milk into an iced Americano. (The Chateau doesn’t do vanilla syrup.) “Sometimes you’ll make a song all night and you’ll be obsessed with it, then you’ll wake up and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard,” he says. His instincts are rarely this wrong, mostly because they’re all he has to rely on. His songs go viral on TikTok not through some kind of algorithmic programming, but because people believe what they’re about. As he puts it: “They don’t come out of a fucking factory.”
Now, three years, one EP, and over 20 singles later, he’s reached what feels like a significant new milestone. The internet still loves him, but it feels bigger now. His songs catch alight when they hit radio—self sufficient, compulsively catchy rock-pop that tells the truth.
All clothing and gloves SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO, Belt NOAH COLLINS, Boots MCQUEEN BY SEÁN MCGIRR
Making these honest tracks is a solitary and nocturnal task for Sombr. Staying up until three, or sometimes five o’clock in the morning, he will sit in his home studio, and start with a drum beat, then a melody, and then “either a vocal melody comes to me right away or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, I’ll move on to the next idea.” If it does, he’ll work on it, bringing the bulk of the idea into Sound City Studios, where parts of Rumors by Fleetwood Mac were recorded, and into the hands of the legendary producer Tony Berg, who’s touched everything from Squeeze to Phoebe Bridgers’ records. “That’s my mentor,” he says. “Fucking best guy ever.” That’s it. No co-writers or committees.
Recently, after performing “Back to Friends” on Fallon, he came off stage to several texts and missed calls from the girl it’s about.He makes music like no one’s meant to listen to it, which means millions of people do. “Bitch, why did you air us out like that?!” He’s recounting the messages to me, and then shrugging them off. “It’s definitely got me in trouble, but if all art was hiding the truth, art would fucking suck,” he says.
The stars of the ’70s didn’t have TikTok to play with, but Sombr does and he uses it well. His online presence is knowingly silly and self satirizing: He pulled up a makeshift tip screen at a fan meet and greet recently, and likes to play into the matcha-drinking, Clairo-streaming soft boy trope. There are videos of him describing himself as 6’7” (fans rebuke this), and an artfully tongue-in-cheek clip of him walking through a parking lot bragging about how much he loves feminist literature frequently appears on different corners of the internet. “I actually can’t read,” he tells me when I ask about it, with such conviction I can’t tell if he’s joking.
Sombr grew up in New York’s Lower East Side with his parents and his sister. “I was a very emotionally complicated child,” he says. “My dad can confirm that.” To his right, his dad, a handsome man in a shirt and a cowboy hat, nods from behind his phone. “But you can’t make music without being a little bit crazy.” He attests to spending much of his teenage years at LES and Tompkins Square skate park, sleeping, or skipping class—a perpetual truant in search of something he actually wanted to do. Performance surrounded him: his dad had a stint in a band (they weren’t big, so it doesn’t count as a nepo thing), and Sombr became, for a brief time, obsessed with the stage musical Dear Evan Hansen. Broadway hasn’t been the same since the musical closed, he thinks. “And for the record, if it opens back up, I would love to be considered for Evan.”
He was one of the few kids in New York who simultaneously found pleasure in Broadway theater and the musical stylings of Lil Peep and Pop Smoke. He discovered GarageBand in middle school and proceeded to make rap beats in his bedroom, thinking that might be his calling. By the time he’d got into LaGuardia High School, auditioning with a Sam Smith song, he’d pivoted to making shoegaze and specializing in vocal performance. Then came the “Caroline” moment.
Coat and top HERMÈS, Necklace TARINA TARANTINO
Top and pants MCQUEEN BY SEÁN MCGIRR
Sombr enters the scene at a time when we’re told his generation are sober and sexless, but the music he makes is hot and narcotizing. In that sense, it feels like a reminder that some things can never die. “12 to 12,” his most recent track, harbors a kind of fraught, juiced-up sexiness. The video stars Addison Rae—who’s arguably brought that same energy to the girls’ world—writhing around on a club dance floor, and in Sombr’s arms. He smirks when I mention her name. The pair hadn’t met before, only exchanged Instagram DM pleasantries, complimenting each other’s music. “I was like, okay, it’s whatever, she doesn’t care about me, though,” he says, laughing. He’s plotting out the story, with a scatty energy, of how that music video turned into a shared star moment. “It’s, like, Wednesday, and the fucking music video shoot is on Saturday,” he recounts. “So I just pull a Hail Mary. I hit them up. It was just so fucking easy, [her team] were so cool about it. I hopped on a Zoom with Addison and we instantly clicked. I got off that Zoom, I fucking, like, did a back flip—no Benson Boone.” And before he knew it, the most fawned-over pop girl in the world was his video partner. “That woman is a fucking natural,” he says.
“All I want is for my best song to be as good as Jeff Buckley’s worst.”
sombr
“12 to 12” was one of the last songs written on the record, but right now, days before the deadline, Sombr is trying to see if there’s time to write one more. “There’s not necessarily something missing, it’s just that I will never think it’s complete,” he insists. “I have to put myself away at a certain point, find a hobby or some shit to stop me from adding songs to it.” He’s been listening to “Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, the Stones, The Beatles, The Verve, Oasis, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers, Rihanna…” Rihanna? He nods. “She’s got the best fucking melodies in the world.” His favorite cut is “Loveeeeee Song.”
You can hear them in I Barely Knew Her, which I hear on a Friday night at midnight over Zoom, such is the secrecy surrounding the project’s existence. Sombr tells me it’s inspired by “young romance, dimly lit rooms, late nights, and love, loss, and life.” Songs like the Dylan-esque “Canal Street” dwell on his return to New York at Christmas, back to the scene of an old relationship where nothing ever feels quite the same. On the chorus for “Dime,” he yearns hard for a girl and cuts a joke in there too: “I wanna love you til the end of my life, because you’re a 10 and I’m a man that needs a dime.” (Sombr’s quick to clear up: “It’s supposed to be sarcastic!”) There’s uptempo tracks and stretching, Sombr-esque ballads, written like the world is ending. He’s the album’s only credited lyricist.
Top SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
I’d asked him to pick an album that he sees himself in, so I could listen to it in the days prior to us meeting. He’d chosen Buckley’s lone LP, Grace, a largely shrugged off album at the time of its release that has, over decades, been cemented as a singer-songwriter classic. Online, people have conflated Sombr’s admiration for Buckley as him wanting to be him—but it’s not a title Sombr infers upon himself. “I’ve been hearing this record as long as I’ve been alive,” he says. His dad played it around the house, and while he was mostly ambivalent towards it back then, he’s since torn into it, realizing they’re both singing from the same hymn sheet. My writing isn’t nearly as good as his writing,” he says, “but one day, all I want is for my best song to be as good as Jeff Buckley’s worst.”
A week later, Sombr unveils the existence of I Barely Know Her to his fans on Instagram. I call him to see how he’s feeling. He’s in the back of a cab, its roof dotted with LED stars, on the way to rehearsals. The last few days had been “chaotic,” he says, “like when you’re trying to finish an essay the night before it’s due.” By this point, the bulk of it had been there, but there were still some floating ideas that had to come down to earth. The album’s final track was one of them. Called “Under the Mat,” it feels like a gorgeous coalescence of his core influences and ideas: anthemic, big, nostalgic, almost Springsteen-esque. Of course, about love.
“I would pay to be on tour, [it’s] the closest thing to drugs.”
sombr
“One of my idols helped me name it,” he says of the album, though part of the sacred agreement was that he wasn’t allowed to say who. I Barely Know Her is the sort of tongue-in-cheek double gag: On one hand, it could be a reflection of a relationship where you feel like you’ve lived a life with someone, but never understood them. On the other, it could be about the blink-and-miss-it lust of a one night stand.
Over the last few years—and surely for the next few months—Sombr will leave his house, go to The Grove, or Erewhon (he’d like a smoothie deal, by the way), or to dinner at a restaurant, and be approached by a stranger who’s found solace in the music he makes. He’s been getting used to this being his new normal. “I’m so grateful that people know who I am,” he says. “It’s just the life I chose. By signing up for it, you’re signing up for [fame], you’re basically able to do nothing without someone seeing it. I’m fine with that.” He just got nominated for his first MTV Video Music Award. Tabloids now write about him. His tour sold out in a matter of seconds. He’ll play his first arena show soon. Of everything, being in front of those crowds is the thing he actually can’t wait for. “I would pay to be on tour,” he insists, hand on heart. Being in front of those crowds is “the closest thing to drugs.”
As he pulls up to his stop, I ask Sombr what got him to this point, staring down the barrel of a new life, his first album as a kid who wanted it so badly. “This is corny to say,” he admits, but he wants to say it anyway: “It’s not like something got me through this. It’s like my music got me through life.”
All clothing EMPORIO ARMANI, Ring Sombr’s own
hair JOHNNIE SAPONG USING HAIR BY JOHNNIE SAPONG FOR LEONOR GREYL AT SALON BENJAMIN AT THE WALL GROUP
makeup PATI DUBROFF AT FORWARD ARTISTS
set design ROBERT DORAN AT FRANK REPS
photography assistants STEVEN PERILLOUX & ALEX DE LA HIDALGA
digital technician RICK ROSE
styling assistant CHRISTIAN GUZMAN
production LOLA PRODUCTION
post production LUCKYSTAR INC.