I Wish I Knew How to Quit You

There is a specific kind of shame that comes with knowing better and doing it anyway. Not the shame of a mistake made in ignorance, but the quieter, more exhausting kind that comes from watching yourself repeat a choice you have already diagnosed as bad for you. That is the emotional terrain sombr stakes out on "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You," the third track on his debut album I Barely Know Her. The title borrows its structure from the language of addiction recovery, and the song follows through on that framing completely, treating a person as something closer to a dependency than a relationship.

It is one of the most direct songs on the record, and also one of the most unresolved. sombr does not pretend to have figured his way out of the situation by the song's end. He simply names it, with unusual clarity, and lets the listener sit inside that clarity with him.

A Debut Built From a Breakout Year

By the time I Barely Know Her arrived on August 22, 2025, sombr, born Shane Michael Boose, was no longer an emerging artist by any reasonable definition^[1]. His singles "Back to Friends" and "Undressed" had already climbed into the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100 that spring, turning a self-taught bedroom songwriter from Manhattan's Lower East Side into a genuine chart presence within a matter of months^[2].

That velocity could easily have produced a rushed victory lap of an album. Instead, sombr and producer Tony Berg built a ten-track record that slows down to examine the emotional wreckage underneath the viral moment, and "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" sits early in that sequence as one of its plainest confessions^[1]. The album was recorded largely at Sound City Studios, with sombr writing and demoing every song alone before bringing finished sketches to Berg, whose credits include Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine, to expand and refine^[5].

Naming the Pattern

Where a song like "Back to Friends" lives inside the confusion of an undefined relationship, "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" is concerned with something more self-aware: the narrator already understands exactly what is happening to him. He is not confused about whether the person he is describing is good for him. He knows the arrangement is lopsided and knows it is hurting him, and the song's tension comes entirely from the gap between that knowledge and his inability to act on it^[6].

The song frames devotion as a one-way transaction. The narrator describes giving everything to a connection that was never fully reciprocated, and rather than resolving that imbalance, the song simply keeps circling it, verse after verse, the way an intrusive thought keeps circling a mind that cannot let it settle^[8]. There is a specificity to the setting, too. Brooklyn locations anchor the narrator's longing in a real, walkable geography, which is consistent with the album's broader habit of using New York City as more than a backdrop, treating it instead as a kind of emotional map that traces exactly where the narrator's memories live^[8].

Addiction as Metaphor

The choice to borrow the vocabulary of quitting a habit rather than the vocabulary of a breakup is what separates this song from a more conventional heartbreak ballad. sombr does not describe himself as sad about a loss. He describes himself as unable to stop returning to a source of harm, which reframes the entire song as a study in compulsion rather than grief^[6]. That framing lets the song sit comfortably alongside some of the more self-destructive imagery elsewhere on the record, where relief is described in terms that resemble avoidance and numbing rather than healing.

It is a metaphor with real teeth, because addiction narratives typically resist tidy endings, and so does this song. The narrator never announces that he has broken free. He never claims a clean resolution. Instead, the song ends the way most attempts at quitting something actually go: with intention outpacing willpower, and the cycle very much still in motion.

Sound as Emotional Fog

Musically, the track leans into a warm, unhurried pulse that keeps the vocal close and intimate, wrapped in a soft distortion that blurs its edges rather than sharpening them^[6]. That blur is a deliberate extension of the song's subject matter. A narrator caught between desire and self-preservation does not experience that conflict with crisp, orderly clarity, and the production mirrors that lack of resolution by refusing to let the melody land somewhere clean and settled. The chorus notably avoids a fully resolved musical phrase, leaving a lingering, unfinished quality that echoes the narrator's own inability to close the loop he keeps describing^[6].

This is consistent with the sonic identity of the album more broadly. Reviewers noted that sombr's debut leans heavily on reverb and atmospheric haze across its ten tracks, with Rolling Stone praising the record's "luscious harmonies, melancholy lyrics, and perfect melodies"^[3], while NME described the finished album as "gloriously exciting" and "a slick, ambitious collection" built for arenas rather than bedrooms^[4]. Soundcheck Magazine pointed specifically to Tony Berg's contribution, crediting the producer with giving sombr's original sketches more room to breathe without sanding down their intimacy^[5].

A Title That Doubles as a Thesis

"I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" is also a useful lens for understanding what sombr says he was reaching for with the album's title as a whole. In an interview with NPR, he described I Barely Know Her as being about the disorientation of realizing, after something shifts in a relationship, that you may never have actually known the other person as well as you thought you did^[7]. That same disorientation runs underneath this song, just inverted. The narrator is not questioning what he knew about the other person. He is questioning what he knows about his own limits, discovering in real time that self-knowledge and self-control are not the same thing.

Taken together with songs like "Canal Street" and "We Never Dated," this track fits into the album's larger pattern of treating emotional entanglement as something that resists easy categories. Not every attachment on this record is a relationship in the traditional sense, and not every loss gets to be mourned in a socially legible way. "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" pushes that idea one step further by suggesting that some attachments do not even require the other person's full participation to become genuinely difficult to leave behind.

Why It Resonates

Part of what makes this song land, beyond its sound, is how unglamorous its honesty is. Pop music has a long tradition of romanticizing obsession, of turning an inability to let go into something sweeping and cinematic. This song resists that instinct. It does not dress up the narrator's compulsion as devotion worth admiring. It simply reports the compulsion as it is: exhausting, repetitive, and a little embarrassing to admit out loud.

That kind of candor is a large part of what has made sombr's songwriting resonate with a young, online audience already fluent in talking about attachment styles and self-sabotage. He is not the first artist to compare heartbreak to addiction, but the specificity of his delivery, plainspoken rather than poetic for its own sake, is what keeps the comparison from feeling like a borrowed cliché.

More Than One Way to Hear It

Some listeners hear this song as a fairly literal account of a specific situationship, one more entry in the same emotional universe as "Back to Friends" and "Undressed," songs also drawn from sombr's own recent romantic history. Under that reading, the addiction metaphor is simply a vivid way of describing garden-variety infatuation with someone unavailable.

Others read it more broadly, less as a song about one specific person and more as a song about a pattern the narrator keeps recognizing in himself across multiple relationships, a tendency toward giving more than he receives and then struggling to walk away once he notices the imbalance. Both readings can coexist. The song is specific enough to feel like a diary entry and general enough that almost anyone who has stayed too long in something they knew was not working can recognize themselves in it.

Conclusion

"I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" does not offer its narrator, or its listener, an easy way out. It offers something more useful: an accurate description of what it feels like to be stuck, without the usual pop-song insistence that naming a problem is the same as solving it. That refusal to fake a resolution is exactly what makes the song feel true, and it is a big part of why sombr's diaristic style has connected with an audience that has grown skeptical of tidy emotional narratives. Sometimes wanting to quit something is not the same as being able to, and sombr lets that gap stand, unresolved, for the full length of the song.