It’s one thing to have a breakout hit, but to have a pair of songs going viral simultaneously is almost unheard of.
For Sombr, though, that’s 2025 in a nutshell. After releasing Back To Friends at the turn of the year, he set about writing and releasing Undressed. After gaining traction on TikTok, both songs became hits and have been riding high in global streaming charts ever since.
Speaking to Music Week recently, Sombr (AKA 20-year-old Shane Michael Boose), suggested that both songs came as a result of him adopting what has turned out to be a winning formula.
“What makes up a ‘legendary indie rock song’?,” he ponders. “Some smacking drums, good melodies, a strong chorus and a bridge. That’s it. That was my reference when I made Back To Friends and Undressed, and for everything going forward.”
Boose says that Undressed was the first song he wrote this year, and that the promising early signs for Back To Friends meant that he had a creative spring in his step.
“It was having a lot of success on streaming, and I was feeling really confident because of that, so I just thought, ‘OK, let me make another one,’” he remembers. “And it pretty much initially all came together in one evening in my studio in my house in LA.”
Sombr began his production career in GarageBand, later graduating to Logic Pro, and says that he now has a tried and tested workflow.
“When I’m writing, I always start with a drum groove, that’s the inspiration for a track,” he confirms. “Then I’ll lay down guitar or piano over it, so in the case of Undressed, it was guitar, my Gibson Les Paul.
“I was just playing around for about 30 minutes, trying different melodies until I landed on the one you hear in the intro. I remember playing the guitar riff and thinking, ‘OK, that is fucking great.’ From there, the song just made sense, it flowed.
Sombr says that he tends to write choruses based on ideas he jots down in a notepad and then “freestyles” the verses over the looped instrumental, And such was his creative flow that he released an unfinished version of Undressed pretty much immediately.
“On that first day working on it, I wrote the verses, choruses and I posted it on the internet. It became my most viral snippet leak to date,” he says.
“Then the next evening I sat down for 15 minutes and wrote the bridge – which is often the final thing I write in a song. At that point, I had the bare bones of the song done and recorded; in the actual song you hear today, the guitars, the riff, the bass, the drums and all the vocals are from those initial takes I did in my bedroom.”
Some spit and polish was required, though, and for that Boose called in producer and mentor Tony Berg, who he describes as “my one and only collaborator and dear friend”. Together they enlisted the help of some “incredible” instrumentalists - Benny Bock, Mason Stoops and Kane Ritchotte.
“We layered the drums with Kane to make them way fatter, Mason did all this atmospheric guitar stuff and Benny added any additional keyboard layers – he did crazy work on the bridge and he’s so good at transitions, people often think it’s an orchestra when they hear [his work] but it’s just him on a synth. By the end of one studio session together, the song was complete,” confirms Sombr.
The rest is viral history and Boose is refreshingly honest about how good it felt when Undressed became a hit.
“I feel like so many artists say, ‘Oh, I just make music to make music, I don’t think about the numbers,’ but at the end of the day, if you’re putting yourself out there, doing it as a job and you have an audience, you have to sell tickets and stream well,” he argues. “It’s hard not to feel a sense of pressure at least in the back of your mind – it’s human!”
Don’t mistake this for a pivot to pure commerciality, though - Sombr says that, going forward, “the art itself” will always be the most important thing, and that hopefully that will be enough.
“It makes me very happy that a lot of alternative music is going mainstream and topping the charts right now,” he says. “I’m biased because I’ll always be an alternative, indie lover; that’s who I am, but I think there’s definitely a resurgence. And I’m so grateful these songs have given me a crazy foundation to put out music that I’m really proud of, and that will hopefully touch many people.”
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