Sombr is strutting across the stage, dragging the microphone stand by its neck and headbanging to his own music with an ecstatic, toothy, dorky smile.
As strobe lights douse the audience, the singer’s voice is drowned out by the gasping screams from the pit of this Brooklyn club. His rangy six-and-a-half-foot frame is xeroxed on the screens of a hundred cellphones. He’s cloaked in a black suit over a sparkling tank top and — as if he needs a lift — cheetah-print heels. His eyes are smeared black. “Some people on TikTok didn’t like it,” he says sheepishly of the skeleton-esque makeup.
When he gets a breath, he looks out and laments, “I haven’t been this close to you guys in a while.” Indeed, the gap between Sombr and his fans has widened over the past 18 months after his yearny breakup smash “Back to Friends” catapulted him to the upper echelon of pop music. Now, his 2025 debut album, “I Barely Know Her,” has 4 billion streams and counting, and ahead of his next record, he’s floating on the full-throated endorsement of Taylor Swift. The next time he headlines a show in New York, it will be at Madison Square Garden.
As the band starts playing another song, the newly minted superstar hops down to the barricade and is absorbed by a zombified crowd of teens, their grasping hands invisibly Sharpied with Xs. This is a pop cult, and a 21-year-old boy from New York named Shane Boose is its leader.
This underplay at Music Hall of Williamsburg was announced only hours before Boose took the stage; an RSVP link was sent via text to the artist’s most ardent New York fans. “We weren’t even allowed to formally announce it,” Boose tells me on the way to the show. Because of his popularity, “the police are concerned about a riot.”
We’re in a black Suburban, one of those tinted-window celebrity movers, and his eyes are hidden behind Wayfarer-style sunglasses. He’s wearing a tight-fitting vintage tee, fringed jeans and boots. His pitch-black curls frame his face, his jawline a chiseled trapezoid under hollowed cheeks. (If he ever gets a biopic, Dominic Sessa and Finn Wolfhard could jockey for the role.) Squeezed in the third row are his publicist, an assistant of sorts and his dad, who’s dressed like a retired Malibu skateboarder.
“This is my first time being interviewed from a car,” Boose says, sipping an iced coffee as yellow cabs whiz past on 33rd Street. “Being in New York for work is a blessing, but sometimes I wish I had more time to go explore and do what I used to do growing up,” he says. He used to take the subway. Now he has a driver. “There are just trade-offs with this career.” (Blessing is a word Boose says three times in the first four minutes of our conversation. Grateful is uttered 12 times. Three honoreds. One lucky.)
Boose lives in Los Angeles now, disclosing his neighborhood “off the record” because, well, “I don’t want stalkers.” He’s grateful that he can make a living doing what he loves, and it’s a blessing that his work touches so many fans. “But I can’t walk anywhere without being recognized and asked for photos,” he says, quickly adding, “which is totally not a problem for me. I don’t mind it.” In fact, he basically enjoys the polite harassment of fans asking for selfies — it has forced him to “always look camera-ready.”
Boose’s ascent to pop stardom began at LaGuardia, the Manhattan performing arts high school whose yearbooks boast the faces of Timothée Chalamet, Jennifer Aniston and Nicki Minaj. As a teen, he began writing and producing songs in his bedroom, releasing them under the name “Sombr” — a pseudonym that incorporated his initials, “SMB,” and also characterized the vibe of his moody breakup tunes. He describes his early efforts as “laughable” — “shitty music with 30 listens on SoundCloud.” He was more concerned about what his peers would say in group chats than about making it big.
“I went to an art school where everyone was too cool for school. And I was one of those too-cool-for-school kids, but I was putting myself out there,” he says. “When you’re in high school, you’re scared to be judged.”
Boose had sworn off TikTok, he explains, because posting on the app was considered “cringe” during the pandemic. But one night he decided to upload a video anyway, showcasing a dreamy acoustic ballad called “Caroline.” “I was so scared that my friends would see it the next day,” he says. When he woke up, the video had 200,000 likes; his cringephobia was cured. “I had already moved on from school,” he laughs. “I was so cocky, like, “Fuck all of you, I’m doing TikTok music!’”
Validating his adolescent ego trip was an email from Columbia Records sitting in his inbox when he got home from school. Boose’s dad warned him not to reply. “That’s a scam,” he said.
“But it wasn’t a scam,” Boose says, still in disbelief. The emails from record companies continued to roll in, with Warner Records flying the 16-year-old to Los Angeles for a meeting. Boose couldn’t believe the labels wanted to “wine and dine” him. “But then I realized, ‘Wait, you guys also want to own my music. So I deserve a lot more than dinner.’”
At 17, Boose signed with Warner and dropped out of high school, a decision that required some convincing in the mom department. “This is what I’m going to school for anyway,” he reasoned. “Either I’ll be a high school dropout and also be dropped by my label, or I’ll be a high school-dropout success story.”
He moved to L.A. as soon as he turned 18, and his label hooked him up with veteran producer Tony Berg, who helped launch Phoebe Bridgers’ career. Boose, who describes himself as cocky (the word comes up 12 times in our interview), credits Berg with keeping him “in check” and teaching him to have higher standards for his writing. “I thought I knew everything,” Boose says, “and he basically showed me that I knew nothing, and that I had a lot of work to do.”
While “Caroline” was a modest hit — the type of splashy breakout that could get him some industry support — Boose’s career failed to launch after his record deal. He released a string of forgettable, downtempo bedroom pop songs, and after three years he worried the label might drop him. Then, a couple days after Christmas in 2024, Boose released “Back to Friends,” a shimmering breakup song that works equally well in AirPods and arenas. It wasn’t an immediate hit, but it bought him some time. The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 in April 2025 and peaked in January 2026, more than a year after its release. It now boasts more than 2 billion streams on Spotify.
The song unlocked something in Boose: His music, suddenly, felt big. There’s a palpable confidence in “I Barely Knew Her,” which honors the lo-fi aesthetic of his early work but scraps the sadboi shtick for some swagger. Listen to the bullhorn vocals on “Crushing,” the effortless beach-rock hooks of “Undressed” or the incandescent disco bomb that is “12 to 12,” which, for my money, is one of the best pop songs of last year. (You get the sense he knows it too: He ends the Brooklyn show by playing it two and a half times.) As his music matured, so did Boose. Bedroom bard no more; there he was, gallivanting across the VMA stage, his bare chest tongued by a backup dancer.
Speaking of bare chests, as we pull up to the concert hall in Brooklyn, Boose is distracted by a young man walking on the sidewalk with his shirt fully unbuttoned. “Look at that guy walking with his chest out,” he says. “Oh my God, bro. He needs to know that he’s not impressing girls. He’s icking them out.”
We load into the venue, and it’s apparent that Boose doesn’t perform in spaces this intimate anymore. Last spring, as “Back to Friends” rode up the charts before the release of his debut album, Boose was frantically upgrading the venues on his tour to meet demand. One show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, for example, became three nights at the Shrine, turning 700 tickets into 15,000.
Touring is Boose’s continuing education. “I’m a kid who dropped out of high school who now has a crew of 30 people on tour with me,” he says, “and they’re looking to me to lead the charge.” When I ask how he survives his nonstop schedule, he shrugs me off. “Touring is the biggest high you can get as an artist,” he says. “For me, it’s more about how I can survive not being on tour.”
We navigate racks of clothing crowding the hallway to his green room, where Boose slumps on a couch shorter than him. His band is sound checking downstairs, and electric guitar-punched karaoke tracks of his songs bleed through the floor, scoring the remainder of our conversation. Meanwhile, it appears tonight’s secret venue has finally been revealed. Outside, a hundred fans have started queueing up down the block, carrying signs, passing out “Sombr Summer” pins and wearing T-shirts mimicking his outfit on the “I Barely Knew Her” cover.
Boose’s relationship to fame, like anyone’s, is complicated. But he describes the connection between himself and his fans as almost spiritual. “My life is devoted to this music and serving you forever,” he wrote to them in an Instagram post last fall. For someone whose adolescent years coincided with the social media boom, he hasn’t yet found a reason to be mysterious. “I’m OK with people knowing everything about me,” he says.
But being a celebrity means Boose has had to deal with the “weird” side of the internet, where “creepy people say creepy things.” He tries to avoid the toxicity, but as a 21-year-old who is highly involved in the social media marketing of his own music, he’s often exposed to the radioactive-sludge-covered comment sections.
“There are rumors built in comment sections that have traveled so far,” he says, vaguely gesturing at falsehoods about his dating history and family. “When that first started happening, I was so down about it. Now, I’ve just accepted it. Everyone can say whatever the fuck they want about me. I know who I am.”
Most insidious are the comments about Boose’s body, which have ranged from faux concern to blatant bullying. Last October, a TikToker went viral with an impassioned takedown of his live show, knocking Boose for making immature jokes and calling him “Slender Man,” a reference to a nightmarish, thin-limbed internet character. Boose fired back with his own TikTok video, chiding her for starting a “massive body-shaming hate train” against him. While the video showed that Boose was willing to confront online attacks, the hate train, so to speak, had already left the station.
This flavor of online vitriol activated a deep-rooted insecurity in Boose. The night before we meet, he released “My Body Isn’t Ready,” a melancholic body-insecurity anthem. The song is about how it’s impossible to love someone else when you’re struggling to love yourself. “I like you, but my body isn’t ready,” Boose sings on the chorus. “I want you, but the mirror won’t let me.” It’s his most vulnerable work to date, and a rare example of a male artist grappling with anxieties tied to appearance.
“I want people who look up to me that might not be happy about their body image to understand that I’m not always happy about my body image,” Boose says. The song has been out for less than a day, but he’s already chuffed by the response. “I saw a comment today that was like, ‘I’m so glad that my favorite artist goes through the same things that I go through,’” he says. “That made me want to cry.”
Last October, Boose had another one of those crazy wake-ups, his phone flooded with notifications. “I had all these texts saying, ‘What the fuck — Taylor Swift just shouted you out in a radio interview!’” he recalls. Indeed, in a rare interview, the biggest artist in the world listed Sombr as an “incredible” addition to her streaming diet.
Boose expressed his gratitude in a note emailed to her representatives, and Swift mailed back a letter and a lucky-charm necklace. “I freaked out and fangirled. And somehow I haven’t fucked it up,” he says of their friendship.
Then in June, when Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, she asked Boose to come along and perform two of her songs.
“I asked Taylor to pick the songs for me, because I wanted the night to be fully about her, but she wouldn’t allow it,” he says. “She was like, ‘No, I want you to pick the songs.’ It put me under a lot of pressure, but she was really happy with my choices.”
Boose selected “Cardigan,” putting a lounge-rock spin on the folky hit, and “Dear John,” in part because Swift wrote it at 19, the age when everything changed for Boose.
Swift bobbed back and forth during Boose’s performance, mouthing the words with a big smile and throwing up her arms in delight. To keep his cool, Boose tried to avoid eye contact with the pop supernova. “If I looked at her for three seconds during the performance, my mind would have completely blanked because that’s Taylor Swift,” he says. “That’s a goddess. I remember looking at her for a split second while performing and almost losing it, but then I looked away.”
Taking the stage next, Swift thanked Boose for a “perfect” performance, said his writing is “so exceptional” that it makes her “actually envious” and declared that “Sombr is the future.”
Funnily enough, what struck Boose the most was hearing her say his first name. “It’s one thing for people to say Sombr, but when I heard Taylor Swift — someone I was never supposed to know — say the name ‘Shane,’ referencing me, that made me tear up,” he says.
I ask what their relationship is like — do they text? Do they hang out? — and Boose walks a verbal tightrope. “I don’t know if I want to get too into it. I don’t want to talk about her without her permission,” he says. He will, however, offer his blessing for her new hubby. “I fucking love Travis Kelce,” he says. “That guy is the nicest guy ever.” In an NDA-shattering delusion, I try to get details about the wedding. “Who said I’m going?” he says, icing me out with a puckish smile.
It’s almost time for Boose to join the sound check, so a staffer knocks on the door to drop off dinner. Boose tears open a plastic bag filled with unlabeled delivery Tupperware. One has chicken tenders; one has dumplings; another has pasta. Envious of the multicultural feast, I ask, “Where’s that from?” and he says, “I don’t even know. They just order me stuff.”
“I have issues with eating,” he says. “Sometimes I do not like eating, and it makes me want to throw up to eat. I can never choose what to eat. I never crave anything.”
He plucks a chicken tender from the basket and wags it in the air. “It’s a weird thing I have,” he goes on. “Most of the time before shows I’m literally eating against my will, so I have enough energy to get through the show.” He says these things with a tone that reads more fascinated than, say, somber. “It’s been my lifelong struggle. I only eat to survive; I don’t eat for pleasure most of the time.”
And then he laughs, drawing a connection between his dietary habits and his latest single. “That’s ‘My Body Isn’t Ready,’ you know? That’s why my body is like that.”
Boose is now a superstar, and the life experiences that inspire his lyrics have transformed entirely. In fact, the act of falling in and out of love, the very hallmark of Boose’s oeuvre, will never be the same.
“Does she just like me for the things I do?” he sings suspiciously of a love interest on “My Body Isn’t Ready.” (“That’s a lyric I couldn’t have written a year ago,” Boose notes.)
“Since my recent success, I haven’t really been able to get out there and get on the market,” he says. “I’m more hesitant, because in my age group most people know me. It’s definitely weird, and I’m figuring it out. I don’t want to date someone who wants to date me for the wrong reasons.”
But the young bachelor in front of me wants to make something clear: “It’s not like my dating life has stopped. I just have to take a different approach. I’m still” — he pauses, looking at the ceiling, grasping, perhaps, for the right way to say “on the prowl” — “getting that inspiration.”