in another life

There is a version of a debut record that announces an artist's arrival with confidence and bravado. in another life, released on September 15, 2023, is not that record. The eight-track EP from sombr, a 17-year-old from New York's Lower East Side^[1], arrives in a much quieter mode. These are songs that sit with feelings which don't announce themselves loudly: the slow erosion of something that used to matter, the particular hollowness of a familiar space after someone has left it. This is the work of a young artist whose emotional intelligence runs ahead of his years, and whose musical instincts were already refined enough to give those feelings a form.

sombr, born Shane Michael Boose^[1], built his foundational musical vocabulary on GarageBand and then Logic Pro X, teaching himself in his bedroom long before he stepped into a professional studio. His 2022 track "Caroline" spread across TikTok and introduced his sound to a substantial audience, drawing comparisons to Bon Iver for its atmospheric production and heavily reverbed vocals^[2]. Warner Records signed him at 17^[3], and throughout 2023 he released a series of singles that would eventually form the backbone of the EP. By the time in another life arrived in September, he had already introduced listeners to the emotional territory he was mapping.

Aftermath as Subject Matter

The EP's central preoccupation is not the moment a relationship ends but the space that opens up afterward. These are songs written from inside that disorientation, circling questions that don't have clean answers: why we behave the way we do, what we do with feelings that don't align neatly with our better judgment, how we make sense of someone who turned out to be different from who we thought they were.

The opening track, built around the image of a secret communication device, explores the experience of discovering that a partner's private life contradicts the version of themselves they've presented. The song doesn't offer resolution. It offers the texture of the discovery itself: the intimacy of something meant to stay hidden, the shock of what that intimacy reveals. It is a striking choice as an opener because it frames the entire EP not as a story of falling in love and losing it, but as an investigation into the complexity underneath.

Throughout the record, sombr returns to versions of this question: what are the real forces at work in the relationships we construct? "why are we like this," the EP's shortest track, distills this inquiry to its most compressed form, sitting with the bewildering patterns that cause people who care for each other to repeatedly hurt each other. It is a small song with a large subject.

What Memory Does to People

If the EP's opening tracks dwell on the confusion of being inside a failing relationship, the latter half turns toward what happens after. Here, the album's title gains its full weight. in another life is not primarily a wistful phrase. It is a description of where certain people and certain versions of yourself now exist. They belong to a different timeline, one you can access only through the increasingly unreliable machinery of memory.

"silhouette" is the EP's most explicit articulation of this. sombr has described the song's animating idea as the way someone who has left your life gradually loses their specificity in your mind: the particular details that made them real, the sound of their voice, the color of their eyes, all of it softening over time into something more like an outline than a person^[4]. It is the kind of observation that reads like a small discovery: grief is not just about loss but about the second loss that follows, the slow fading of even the memory of who you lost. The song's title is its thesis. People don't vanish from our minds all at once. They become silhouettes first.

This preoccupation with what time does to recollection runs through the album's quieter moments. "my house is warm" approaches the same territory from a different angle: the domestic space as an archive of feeling, a place that holds the imprint of someone even after they're gone. The album understands that places carry the weight of what happened in them, even when the people involved have moved on.

Two Things at Once

One of the more distinctive aspects of the EP is sombr's refusal to simplify emotional experience into a clean before-and-after. The album is full of feelings that coexist in uncomfortable proximity: attraction and grief, tenderness and bitterness, the desire to hold on and the understanding that holding on is impossible.

"you're so pretty" makes this explicit, sitting with the way someone's beauty can be the source of both joy and pain almost simultaneously: a quality that draws you in while reminding you of everything complicated about being drawn in. "weak" operates on the same principle, though with more urgency. sombr has described the song as an attempt to capture how quickly feelings can shift, how contradictory emotional states don't resolve into each other so much as collide^[3]. The lyrics deliberately place contradicting statements side by side rather than resolving them into a coherent position, which mirrors the experience of grief that keeps looping back rather than moving forward.

This emotional ambivalence is what gives the EP its maturity. Heartbreak music often wants to tell a story with a shape: beginning, middle, eventual redemption. in another life resists that. It stays in the uncomfortable middle, where things don't add up and where contradictions persist without resolving.

The Sound of Restraint

The sonic world of the EP was constructed in collaboration with producer Tony Berg^[5], a veteran known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius. Recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles^[5], the EP marked sombr's first time working in a professional studio after years of self-produced bedroom recordings. Berg helped translate sombr's demos into something more fully realized. "weak," for instance, began as two separate bedroom demos that only found their final shape through the studio collaboration, two incomplete ideas forged into a single coherent piece^[3].

The resulting sound is deliberately restrained. Atmospheric folk textures, electronic shimmer, and production choices that draw comparisons to Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, and Maggie Rogers sit alongside each other without ever pushing for grandeur^[2]. The arrangements hold back, which suits the material. These are intimate songs about private feelings, and the production makes space for them to breathe. Warner Records CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck described sombr's music as taking listeners on a journey through mesmerizing melodies^[3], and what makes that description accurate is less any individual moment of sonic drama than the cumulative effect of sustained emotional attention.

sombr would later reflect that his work from this period represented an attempt to make music he thought people wanted rather than music that was entirely true to himself^[6]. He described the commercial pressure of the situation openly: signed young, with a window opening and closing quickly, aware that not generating certain numbers could mean the end of the deal^[7]. By 2025, with "Back to Friends" breaking through on a massive scale and a debut album receiving strong critical attention, that retrospective framing became a familiar part of his public narrative.

But the vulnerability in in another life doesn't read as calculated. Whatever the commercial pressures around its making, the EP sounds like someone working through real feelings in real time: the experience of loving and losing and trying to understand what remains. The title's gesture toward alternate versions of events turns out to be the album's most honest admission. Things could have gone differently, people could have been different, and there is a quiet grief in that recognition that no amount of retrospective context quite explains away.

in another life is the work of a young artist finding his footing, drawing on considerable natural gifts and newly acquired professional tools, making something more emotionally coherent than most debut records. It is not a triumphant arrival. It is a more valuable thing: a careful document of what it feels like when something ends and you don't quite know what to do next.