A new month is upon us, and in pop in 2025 that means one thing: New sensitive dude just dropped. His name, unfortunately, is sombr. His aesthetic is part indie sleaze, part Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. Despite his stage name, his music is not really somber; it’s jaunty radio bait that, if not fully rock, is certainly rock-coded. His lyrics aren’t quite somber either, but they’re definitely pained: His album, I Barely Know Her, presents 10 angles on the girl who broke his heart. Unsurprisingly, he gets mobbed by girls both on stage — see last weekend’s VMA PDA — and in person; one imagines that at least some of his fast-growing fanbase was drawn by the seductive pull of “I can fix him.”

For everyone else, though, here’s a quick primr. The artist born Shane Michael Boose grew up in New York in the Lower East Side, skipping class to go skate in Tompkins Square Park. He attended the LaGuardia School of Performing Arts, a well-known industry incubator — its alumni include Nicki Minaj, Liza Minnelli, Eartha Kitt, and the aforementioned Chalamet. Schools like this often function less as an educational institution than one long open-call audition, and sombr’s callback came before he graduated. In 2022, after some adolescent GarageBand noodling and amateur beatmaking, he posted a full original song: “Caroline.” It’s a watery ballad with big wailing and lyrics generic enough to apply to anything a listener may feel sombr about, from breakups to grieving to ghosting. If that sounds harsh, sombr agrees: “There’s no story, it’s just sad vibes,” he recently told The New York Times. But the public loves sad vibes. “Caroline” went viral, and labels took note, including Warner Records — specifically, the guys at Warner Records who signed Zach Bryan, Benson Boone, and Teddy Swims.

All three of those artists are recognizable as a Type Of Guy, a type you know when you hear and that you also hear pretty much all the time these days, but one that no one’s quite figured out how to describe. (People have thrown out “tradpop,” “stomp clap hey,” and “The Voice audition core.”) However you define it, sombr fits. Like Teddy and Boone, he’s a showy, theatrical singer — though he tends to mask his classical training with fuzzy distortion — and more self-aware than you’d think. (On TikTok, sombr mocked his similarities to another Type Of Guy: the feminist-literature-reading “performative male.”) Like Alex Warren, he’s a dutiful optimizer of virality variables and a deeply earnest person both on record and off — though where Warren sings about being in love, sombr sings about being out of it. Somehow, though, he’s gotten less heat than the cohort he resembles. It’s not that he doesn’t have haters, as he wryly admitted in the Times profile: “Last weekend, someone tripped me for being sombr.” (Alright, that’s kinda funny.) But fans as well as critics have largely found him far less trippable.

So what do people hear in this guy? One particularly hagiographic profile wonders: “Can Sombr Save Rock ‘n’ Roll?” sombr won the VMA for Best Alternative Act, and here MTV was just following the industry lead: “Undressed” is the first new #1 hit on the rock/alternative charts since Billie Eilish’s “Birds Of A Feather” over a year ago. I Barely Know Her was produced with boygenius collaborator Tony Berg, and what his predistressed-jeans production here lacks in restraint (maybe sombr and boygenius should swap names), it makes up in associative cred. Already, sombr’s music has been likened to the Beach Boys (harmonies), Jeff Buckley (sensitive-heartthrob vibes), the Killers (homeopathic scuzz), Panda Bear (the way that scuzz is layered) and Bon Iver (…falsetto?). The comparisons aren’t inaccurate — sombr’s claimed many of them as inspirations, although he’s also told Billboard that “if a piece of music can be described as ‘alternative’ or ‘indie,’ he’s probably going to enjoy it,” which is less an assertion of taste than the most 19-year-old statement ever put to print. But in the haste to appoint sombr as canon successor, they skip right past his closer inspirations from the more recent pop-rock past: Vance Joy, Noah And The Whale, Foster The People — “Crushing” in particular is like “Goodbye To All That” by way of “Pumped Up Kicks” — or even Sam Smith; sombr auditioned for LaGuardia with a Smith track, and tracks like “Come Closer” replace their riffs quickly with his characteristic falsetto blare.

Perhaps it’s a certain kind of rock. For all the talk of getting undressed, and all the low V-cut stage costumes sombr wears on stage, I Barely Know Her is less sexed-up than temporarily sexless. This gives the record an oddly unthreatening, “clean-version” vibe, like the 1975 for people leery of Matty Healy’s extracurricular activities, or the Strokes for people disinclined to meet anyone in the bathroom. Among sombr’s lyrical fixations is the notorious Dimes Square, one of the many micro-neighborhoods that the formerly sprawling Lower East Side has shed off over the decades. Despite the neighborhood being too new (or made-up) to have a musical ambassador — the closest artist is probably the Dare — sombr is gunning hard for that role. He debuted his album with an outdoor pop-up show in the area, dressed up his VMA set like the flyer-strewn bathroom of a Manhattan dive, and even sequenced the tracks “Canal Street” and “Dime” back to back. But if he’s aware of the neighborhood’s less savory reputation, like the fash-adjacent, Peter Thiel-funded hypebeasts who mythologized it first, he knows better to mention it: “[Dimes Square] is my favorite place to just sit and have a drink and hang out with friends. Amazing food, amazing people,” he said in 2023. Add to that list: The Wouldn’t Dare.

Perhaps sombr’s appeal is simpler still: The musical face of the male loneliness epidemic. Virtually every song on I Barely Know Her finds sombr singing either about girls he can no longer have, or girls he deserves to have and doesn’t. Sometimes this shades into possessiveness, as on single “Undressed” and its Drake-ish “I don’t want the children of another man to have the eyes of the girl I won’t forget.” Whether this kind of thing exudes romantic agony or whiny male entitlement probably depends on how charitable, heartbroken, or teenage you are. But no one’s at their kindest when heartbroken; only the most enlightened among us want to wallow to songs about maturely moving on. Songs like “Back To Friends” — kind of the straight male version of Chappell Roan’s “Casual” — are undoubtedly useful to people, and I Barely Know Her isn’t a breakup album as artistic statement so much as a breakup album as catharsis tool. (Probably a factor: While many canonical breakup records — Here, My Dear, Jagged Little Pill, Lemonade, Rumours — are powered in part by artists’ real-life romantic gossip, sombr has no such juice, unless you count some transparent attempts to plant Addison Rae dating rumors.)

As for me? He seems like a likeable enough guy, but nevertheless, we have beef: I only realized a few listens in that the album title is a pun. That one’s a groanr.

POP TEN

CLOSING TIME

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