sombr doesn’t want to get undressed for a new person, all over again. And how can he go back to being friends, when you just shared a bed?
sombr (pronounced… ‘sombre’) was born in 2005, placing him perfectly within what those in the industry like to call “peak zoomer age bracket poster boy for maximum profit”. His breakthrough singles—the afore-referenced ‘undressed’ and ‘back to friends’ (note the lower case)—are, to put it alliteratively, a smorgasbord of Gen Z sacred sexual sentiment.
Written and produced solely by the New York native himself—real name Shane Boose—the songs capture a feeling amongst the TikTok generation of vague conservatism and dating disdain. And the TikToker gen LOVE them! ‘back to friends’ and ‘undressed’ have racked up 600 million streams between them, with both sitting comfortably in the UK Official Singles Chart Top 10 at time of writing. Amusingly, both are directly above Ed Sheeran singles (‘Sapphire’ and ‘Azizam’, anyone?).
Musically, the songs are quite gloomy and downbeat, as is their cover art—the singer pictured in various states of looking downward, melancholy and monochrome. It’s testament to sombr’s perfect capturing of the zeitgeist that he’s managed to perform so, so successfully and achieve such virality in a musical market already flooded by sad boys.
Polyester Magazine recently covered the supposed death of the ‘bad boy’ in their online series ‘Non Threatening Boys’: they point to existence of Benson Boone (of moonbeam ice cream) and the rebranding of Damiano David (formerly of leather rock’n’roll band Måneskin, now of pop mainstream) as evidence of the culture’s current shunning of the once-revered Bad Boy. They make the quite dark and quite good point that modern masculinity has become very difficult territory to navigate vis a vis. rise of the manosphere, extreme misogyny etc. Perhaps the sad boys now need to explicitly mark themselves as sexually restrained, to differentiate themselves from the sad boys that… are not.
So, sombr is a 2025 mutant bad boy, in that he is sad and sensitive and needs fixing, but he is NOT going to cheat on you! Once again, the sad male troubadour is by no means a newly emerging 2020s phenomenon: in fact, the 2010s were somewhat dominated by the Lewis Capaldi / Ed Sheeran / Hozier type. But there is something different and uniquely Gen Z to sombr and his message that suggests a new take on this classic chart character—perhaps, one reflecting the Current Political Landscape (gag).
As sombr’s exact demographic, his singles evoke a difficult to pin down discomfort in me. It’s best described as the feeling of being aggressively catered for – I recall, in recent memory, the same churlish resistance to e.g., Olivia Rodrigo in 2021, Taylor Swift in 2024, and Harry Styles (general). It boils down to: “I am being discussed in marketing meetings, and I don’t like it.”.
However, things may be changing still, as the artist’s latest release ‘we never dated’ is slightly left-field of his claim to fame singles. He’s getting pretty Hozier with it, but he doesn’t sound as downtrodden. Perhaps sombr will follow in the Damiano David route of positivity rebranding, returning to the charts with the stage name ‘cheerfl’.
“Bittersweet” by XoMEoX is licensed under CC BY 2.0.