Ivy

Some love songs are about connection. “Ivy” is about something closer to entrapment: a devotion so total it stops behaving like love and starts behaving like survival. Over a hushed, largely acoustic arrangement, sombr turns a single climbing plant into an extended metaphor for codependency, describing an attachment that has grown so tightly wound around another person that the two identities can no longer be pulled apart without damage to both.

The track sits second on in another life, sombr's 2023 debut EP^[4], released through Warner Records and his own imprint SMB^[5]. It arrived a full two years before “Back to Friends” and “Undressed” turned him into one of the defining new voices in alternative pop, which makes “Ivy” less a footnote than an early blueprint: a rawer, less commercially polished version of the emotional extremity that would later reach millions of listeners.

A Debut Built in Private

sombr, born Shane Michael Boose, taught himself to record using GarageBand as a child and later Logic Pro as a teenager, writing and producing songs alone in his bedroom years before any label was involved^[1]. That self-sufficiency became his signature. Even after his single “Caroline” went viral in 2022 and Warner Records signed him, he kept insisting on writing by himself, treating songwriting as the one place he refused to filter or soften what he was feeling^[2].

in another life marked his first major-label project, an eight-song EP co-produced with veteran producer Tony Berg and released on September 15, 2023^[5]. Berg became something closer to a creative partner than a hired hand, but the writing itself stayed sombr's alone, which is part of why “Ivy” reads less like a crafted pop narrative and more like a diary entry set to a melody. Around this period, sombr has been blunt about why he writes this way, saying that art which hides the truth isn't worth making^[2].

The vocal performance carries a lot of that intimacy. Jeff Buckley is among sombr's most-cited influences, shaping his vocal approach in particular^[1], and the strained, close-mic'd delivery on “Ivy” owes something to that lineage, a voice that sounds like it's confessing rather than performing. The arrangement stays largely out of the way of that confession, giving the vocal room to carry the song's emotional weight without a wall of production to hide behind.

The Plant That Strangles What It Holds

The title does real work. Ivy is a vine that survives by climbing, wrapping itself around walls, trees, and structures, and tightening its grip as it grows^[3]. Used as a name and a symbol at once, it lets the song describe a person and a psychological state in the same breath: attachment without boundaries, where affection has curdled into something that slowly damages whatever it holds onto^[3].

The narrator describes losing the ability to separate their own emotional state from the other person's, a kind of enmeshment where someone else's mood becomes the only weather system that matters^[6]. Rather than empathy, it plays as fusion: the narrator can't picture a version of their own life that doesn't orbit this other person, and every attempt to imagine moving on collapses back into the same fixation^[3].

That fixation shows up as a kind of pattern-seeking, too. The narrator describes catching glimpses of this person in other people entirely, unable to stop measuring every new face against the one they can't let go of^[6]. It's a small but telling detail, because it shows the attachment has outgrown the actual relationship. Even in the other person's absence, their outline keeps reappearing, projected onto whoever happens to be nearby. The narrator also can't tolerate the thought of this person building a life with someone else, a possessiveness that has less to do with love in the traditional sense and more to do with needing to remain the center of someone else's world in order to feel like the center of their own^[6].

Love as Life Support

That fixation curdles into something darker as the song goes on. sombr frames the stakes in stark, all-or-nothing terms, describing a version of devotion where losing this one relationship would mean losing any reason to keep going at all^[6]. It reads less as a statement about romance than about a mind that has narrowed its entire sense of meaning down to a single source, so that the loss of that source doesn't just hurt, it threatens to erase the narrator's reason to exist.

There's also an undertow of nostalgia running beneath the desperation. Part of what the narrator is chasing isn't just the other person but a former version of themselves, someone who felt safe and steady before this attachment took over^[6]. The idea of being “taken home” recurs as a kind of shorthand for that restoration, less a literal place than an emotional state the narrator is convinced only this one person can unlock. By the song's end, the structure loops back on itself rather than resolving, a repetition that mirrors the narrator's own inability to break the cycle they're describing^[6].

It's worth being precise about what that darkness is doing structurally. The song doesn't build toward the admission as a shocking twist; it treats it as the logical endpoint of everything that came before, the place all that fusion and pattern-seeking was always heading. That's what separates “Ivy” from a more conventional breakup song. It isn't cataloguing grief after the fact. It's staying inside the moment before collapse, describing what the world looks like from within an attachment that has stopped being sustainable.

Set against its EP siblings, “Ivy” stands out for how active its unhappiness is. Other tracks on in another life tend to look backward, cataloguing what's left after someone is already gone and the details of a lost relationship have started to blur into something softer and less specific. “Ivy” is not that kind of song. It is not written from the safety of hindsight. The relationship it describes is still happening, or at least still being fought for, which gives it a more claustrophobic, present-tense urgency than the EP's more elegiac tracks.

Why Ivy Still Resonates

Part of what makes “Ivy” land is how unfashionable its honesty is. sombr has talked about writing almost exclusively from his own experience, blending real relationships with other kinds of material but rarely softening the emotional content to make it more comfortable to listen to^[2]. That refusal to sand down the ugliest parts of longing is exactly what a song about obsessive attachment needs in order to feel true rather than performative.

It also helps that in another life, unglamorous and largely overlooked at the time of its release, has aged into something like an origin document^[5]. Listeners who came to sombr through his 2025 breakout can hear, in a song like “Ivy,” the same unfiltered emotional register that later powered his biggest hits, just without the professional gloss. The vocabulary around anxious attachment and codependency has also become far more mainstream in the years since the EP's release, giving a song like this a second life among listeners newly equipped with language for the feeling it describes.

“Ivy” also arrived at a moment when a whole strain of online music culture was rewarding exactly this kind of unfiltered confession. Short-form platforms turned bedroom singer-songwriters into a genre of their own, where a single verse of unglamorous, almost embarrassing honesty could travel further than a polished chorus. sombr's earlier single “Caroline” had already shown him how quickly that kind of rawness could find an audience, and “Ivy” applies the same instinct to a harder subject: not simple heartbreak, but the discomfort of admitting how consuming an attachment had become. That willingness to sit in an unflattering feeling rather than resolve it neatly is a big part of why songs like this keep circulating years after their release, clipped and recontextualized by listeners who recognize themselves in it.

Other Ways to Hear It

Not every listener hears “Ivy” as being about a single romantic relationship at all. Because the plant metaphor is built around the mechanics of dependency itself, rather than around any specific person, the song reads just as easily as a portrait of compulsive attachment in general, the kind that could describe a destructive habit, a toxic friendship, or any relationship where a person has quietly handed over their entire sense of self^[3].

There's also an ambiguity built into the title. “Ivy” could be a real name, a specific person the narrator can't let go of, or it could function purely as symbol, a stand-in for the pattern of clinging itself rather than any one relationship. Read that second way, the song becomes less a confession about one person and more a study of a shape love can take when it stops being chosen and starts being compulsive.

It's also possible to hear the song as being in dialogue with itself, aware of its own unhealthiness even as it describes it. The lyrics don't ask for the listener's approval of the narrator's fixation; if anything, the extremity of the language, the willingness to reach for the darkest possible framing, plays like an unflinching self-diagnosis rather than a plea for sympathy. That self-awareness is part of what keeps “Ivy” from tipping into melodrama. It knows exactly how far gone its narrator is, and it says so plainly rather than dressing the feeling up as something nobler than it is.

What makes “Ivy” worth returning to isn't the drama of its subject matter but the precision of its metaphor. Plenty of songs describe heartbreak; fewer describe the specific, uncomfortable feeling of losing yourself inside another person before the heartbreak even arrives. Written and recorded years before sombr became a household name, it stands as an early, unguarded sketch of the emotional territory he would spend the rest of his career mapping in increasingly public ways.