Through It All

A Confession Played on Loop

Years before sombr was selling out arenas and picking up a Grammy nomination, he was a teenager recording confessions into a laptop microphone in a Lower East Side bedroom. "Through It All," released on May 13, 2022^[1], is one of the small, unpolished documents from that period. It does not dress up longing so much as let it circle back on itself, over and over, until the listener feels exactly how exhausting infatuation can be.

There is no chorus that resolves, no bridge that offers perspective. The song simply keeps returning to the same handful of admissions, and that refusal to move forward is the whole point. It is less a love song than a transcript of a mind that cannot stop replaying itself.

A Bedroom Demo That Outgrew Its Bedroom

sombr is the stage name of Shane Michael Boose, who was born on New York City's Lower East Side and began teaching himself production as a young teenager, well before any label or professional collaborator entered the picture^[2]. "Through It All" arrived in the middle of a dense run of self-released singles, sitting on the Wikipedia discography's list of non-album tracks between "Fine" and "Caroline," with no accompanying video and no chart data attached to it at the time^[3]. It was never meant to be a statement piece. It was one entry in a cluster of stripped-back, self-produced songs, among them "Nothing Left to Say," "Fine," "Willow," and "Caroline," that Boose put out between 2021 and 2022 while still enrolled as a vocal major at LaGuardia High School^[4].

That context matters. "Caroline," released weeks after "Through It All," is the song that caught fire and eventually pulled Boose out of school and into a deal with Warner Records^[2]. "Through It All" did not carry that same commercial weight, but it was built from the same raw materials: a laptop, a vocal booth improvised out of a bedroom, and a songwriter with no professional filter yet in place. He would not begin his now-close creative partnership with producer Tony Berg for another year^[2], which means every strange, repetitive, unfinished-sounding choice on this track is entirely his own.

Boose grew up in and around Manhattan's Dimes Square scene, a post-pandemic downtown culture known for its blend of irony and intensity^[5]. The contrast between that environment and his music has followed him ever since: a performer capable of theatrical, internet-fluent showmanship on stage, writing lyrics that read like they were never meant to leave a locked diary^[5]. "Through It All" is an early, unguarded example of exactly that split.

It is worth remembering how literally homemade this era of his catalog was. Boose started experimenting with GarageBand in elementary school and had graduated to a proper bedroom setup by his early teens, equipment he paid for himself with money earned scooping ice cream^[2]. "Through It All" was made on that same kind of self-funded, self-taught setup, with no outside ears involved in shaping it before release. The lo-fi rawness of the recording is not an aesthetic choice borrowed from a genre trend; it is simply what a teenager's bedroom studio sounded like at the time.

The Shape of an Obsessive Thought

Structurally, the song is built almost entirely around repetition rather than progression. Instead of tracing a beginning, middle, and end to a romance, the narrator keeps circling back to the same self-description: someone who falls for people again and again, who cannot set a feeling aside no matter how many times he tries to talk himself out of it^[6]. He describes his own persistence almost apologetically, as though he is narrating a pattern he recognizes in himself but has never managed to break.

The narrator also frames his pursuit as something closer to fate than choice, an emotional undertow rather than a decision he is making with any real control. He keeps signaling his feelings toward the person he wants, promising to keep doing so until they are won over, and that promise repeats until it stops sounding like romance and starts sounding like a loop he cannot exit^[6]. The sparseness of the production works in service of that effect. With so little instrumental clutter to hide behind, the vocal repetition becomes the entire architecture of the song, mimicking the way an intrusive thought loops back at three in the morning long after it has stopped being useful.

That claustrophobic quality is deliberate in effect even if it was not fully deliberate in execution. A more polished pop song would vary its phrasing to keep the listener's attention. This one refuses to, and the refusal is what makes it feel less like a performance of longing and more like an accidental recording of it.

Devotion or Fixation

The song never quite settles whether its narrator is being romantic or unwell. Read one way, it is a familiar teenage confession: the terror and thrill of wanting someone so badly that dignity stops being a priority. Read another way, the fixation reads as genuinely uncomfortable, a young man describing his own inability to let go with something closer to alarm than pride^[6]. The song does not pick a side, and that ambiguity is precisely what keeps it from curdling into either a straightforward love song or a straightforward cautionary tale.

There is also a second, less literal reading worth taking seriously. Rather than describing pursuit of another person at all, the song can be heard as an internal conversation, the narrator wrestling with a part of himself he has not yet learned to accept^[6]. Under that interpretation, the repeated vow to keep pushing until he gets what he wants is not about winning someone else over. It is about reconciling with an impulse, a mood, or a version of himself that keeps resurfacing no matter how many times he tries to talk it down. That reframing turns a song that sounds obsessive on its surface into something closer to a portrait of self-acceptance.

Years later, sombr would describe his own songwriting in terms that fit either reading comfortably. He has said his lyrics are rarely about one specific person, and instead blend details from past relationships, films, and books into lines that read as emotionally precise even when they are composites, with the explicit goal of giving listeners something they can use to process whatever they are going through^[2]. A song this repetitive and unresolved is easy to project onto, which may be exactly why it has stuck around.

Why an Overlooked Single Still Resonates

"Through It All" belongs to a broader wave of early-2020s bedroom pop, music made and distributed almost entirely through phones and laptops before it ever touched a professional studio. That DIY grit has remained part of sombr's identity even after major-label success, and by his own account he has worked to preserve it rather than sand it down^[5]. Hearing "Through It All" now, alongside the far more polished singles that made him famous in 2025, works almost like a control group: proof that the emotional register he built a career on, the raw nerve, the repetition, the refusal to perform confidence, was present before any producer, label, or algorithm had a hand in shaping it.

Most listeners who found sombr through "Back to Friends" or "Undressed" encountered "Through It All" only after the fact, as an artifact of an artist still finding his voice rather than a hit they lived through in real time. That retroactive discovery is part of how the song functions now. It rewards the kind of listener who wants to trace a throughline, to hear the unfinished version of a style that would later be smoothed into something radio-friendly, and to notice that the vulnerability was never manufactured for the breakthrough. It was there from the very first bedroom recordings.

It also fits neatly into a wider pattern of the era: teenagers turning laptops and phone microphones into confessional instruments, releasing songs directly to streaming and social platforms without a label's involvement, and letting an audience decide in real time whether a feeling was worth sitting with. sombr's 2021 to 2022 run, "Through It All" included, is one small piece of that larger shift in how intimate a pop song is allowed to sound before anyone has smoothed out its rough edges^[4].

The Weight of Repeating Yourself

"Through It All" is not a grand artistic statement, and it was never trying to be one. It is a snapshot of a specific, uncomfortable feeling: the moment when wanting someone has stopped being exciting and started being involuntary, when you can hear yourself repeating the same promise and know it is starting to sound less like devotion and more like a compulsion.

That the song still lands, years later and stripped of any commercial urgency, says something about how universal that feeling is. Most people have, at some point, caught themselves saying the same thing to someone for the third or fourth time, aware of how it sounds and unable to stop anyway. sombr just happened to record it, alone, in a bedroom, before anyone was listening. The song's afterlife, discovered by a much larger audience than it was ever built for, is a reminder that the smallest, least calculated recordings sometimes carry the most durable truth.