Tik Tok Viral Stars: sombr - "Back to Friends"

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is the Hit Maker Chronicle. I want to talk about one of the most relatable music industry stories I've heard in years, and it's about a nineteen year old kid who had to learn the hardest lesson in the business. Sometimes your first hit isn't your breakthrough. Shane Booze, who records a somber all Lowercase, went to bed on a Tuesday night in September twenty twenty two as a normal high school student making beats in his parents' house in New York. When he woke up Wednesday morning, his song Caroline had gone viral on TikTok overnight. I went to bed, just a normal high school kid, and I wake up the next day it's viral, he told Variety. Literally the next day, every record label is in my inbox. Now here's the thing you need to understand. Months earlier, this same kid had been sending those exact same labels his music with zero responses radio silence. So when he told his father what was happening, his dad's reaction was probably what yours or mine would be. I don't believe you, but it was real. Within days, Somber was on a plane to Los Angeles signing his first record deal with Warner Records.

1:23 He was seventeen years old. He dropped out of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, Yes, the school the movie Fame was based on, and moved west to start his music career. He found a mentor in Tony Berg, the legendary producer who'd worked with Phoebe Bridgers boy genius Taylor Swift at Berg's historic studio, Sound City. Everything happened fast, Everything happened young and then and this is where the story gets interesting. For two and a half years, almost nothing happened at all. So here's what happened between Caroline in twenty twenty two and back to friends in late twenty twenty four. Somber released almost twenty songs twenty and none of them hit. I cannot imagine how discouraging that must have been. You're a teenager who just got plucked out of high school because you made a viral song in your bedroom. Your ego gets stroked, Labels are fighting over you. You signed a Warner Records.

2:26 You're living the dream, right, and then you release song after song after song and nothing. The numbers aren't there, the streams aren't happening, And you know, because you're not naive, because you're paying attention, that if you don't deliver numbers within a certain timeframe, you get drop. That's the business. I was definitely discouraged, Somber admitted. I was signed at seventeen. My ego was stroked so hard I left school. I was making a bunch of stuff and wasn't seeing the numbers my label had hoped for, which was really hard because I was so passionate about the music. Now Tony Berg, his mentor, could have panicked, could have pushed him to chase another viral moment, to manufacture something that sounded like Caroline but different enough to feel new. But Berg did something smarter. He treated Somber like an artist, not a content creator. He introduced him to art, films, albums, and books, heavy emphasis on The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys.

3:31 Somber listened to the albums, the books. It felt like homework. I was a hater of school and had just dropped out. I was not fucking studying. I love that honesty. But here's what's important. During those two and a half years, Somber had a small loyal fan base, not big enough to justify the record deal, not big enough to feel secure, but real I kind of needed this, he said about what came next, And I'm really grateful that it happened when it happened. Here's where the story gets really interesting. Back to Friends wasn't made with Tony Berg, it wasn't a big studio production. Somber made it completely alone, the same way he'd made Caroline in his bedroom, with logic on a Mac, some outboard SyncE, a Midi keyboard, and eight hundred dollars microphone and an upright piano. And here's what he said about it, which I think is one of the most important quotes about creativity I've heard in a long time. Everything before Back to Friends was me making what I thought people wanted to hear or what I thought would work. That just wasn't the truth. It's a mind fuck having your passion become a job. Back to Friends was when I got past that and said, I'm gonna make what I feel like making. Let me tell you about his process, because it's fascinating. Somber doesn't start with chords or a melody. He starts with rhythm.

5:00 When I start with a drum groove, I can set a vibe rather than set a chord progression, he explained. He programmed a loop in addictive drums, built the foundation, then let everything else spiral outward from there. Piano bassed notes on the upright, layers and layers of background vocals just simple ooze and harmonies stacked on top of each other. Hearing one of them alone sounds so shit, he laughed. But then when they're all together, they sound so great. The vocal production is brilliant. He uses heavy distortion on the verses, then opens up to fuller, cleaner choruses. It's like Yin and yang, he said. I want it to sound so emotional, but the distortion is kind of like the vocals trying to cut through and escape. And the lyrics, God, the lyrics are so specific. How can we go back to being friends slash when we just shared a bed slash?

5:56 How can you look at me and pretend slash I'm some one you've never met. That's the entire emotional architecture of a situation millions of people have lived through, but that very few songs managed to articulate this precisely when you hook up with a friend and then have to pretend it didn't happen. The awkwardness, the yearning, the confusion. When Somber played the finish chorus back, he knew he felt it. This was the one. So Somber releases Back to Friends on December twenty seventh, twenty twenty four. And I need you to appreciate the timing here. December twenty seventh is literally the musically quietest week of the entire year.

6:40 Everyone's on holiday, no one's paying attention. Most artists actively avoid releasing new music during this week, and for weeks nothing happened. The song just sat there. Somber kept posting about it on his socials, kept pushing it, but the numbers weren't moving. Then March twenty twenty five hit and TikTok found it. The song started getting used in videos, then more videos. Then it exploded over two hundred forty thousand videos using the sound. And what's beautiful about this is that people weren't dancing to it or doing challenges. They were connecting with the emotion. Rolling Stone later described how Somber managed to channel the nostalgic twenty fourteen Tumbler Grunge Esthetic Era. They wrote that the indie pop record plays out like an impassioned conversation that bleeds through the walls and captures the melodrama of teenage love. The streaming numbers started climbing April fifth, twenty twenty five. The song debuted at number one hundred forty on the Billboard Global two hundred. One week later, it entered the Hot one hundred at number ninety. In week nine, it jumped twenty six spots from sixty two to thirty six. By January tenth, twenty twenty six, we're talking about its fortieth week on the chart, it hit number seven. Let me put that timeline in perspective. Somber released this song in December twenty twenty four. It didn't go viral until March twenty twenty five.

8:11 It didn't crack the top ten until January twenty twenty six. That's over a year of slow, steady climbing. But here's what else happened. Back to Friends topped the Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart for sixteen consecutive weeks, sixteen weeks at number one. It also topped Alternative Airplay and Pop airplay. It went platinum, and the music video, directed by Gus Black and featuring model Charlotte de Lesio, won Best Alternative Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. On May twentieth, twenty twenty five, Somber performed back to Friends on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon his television debut. He was still nineteen years old, think about that, he'd been signed for over two years, had released twenty songs that didn't connect, and now here he was on Fallin performing the song that finally broke through. His second single, Undressed, followed a similar trajectory slow build TikTok virality eventual climb to number sixteen on the Hot one hundred. Both songs became the foundation of his debut album, I Barely Know Her, which he released August twenty second, twenty twenty five. The album is thirteen tracks of pop and indie rock, exploring heartbreak, longing, and life in New York City. Every song written and produced by Somber and Tony Berg. Variety called it a

9:41 confident and fully realized debut, saying Somber elevates the bedroom pop of his earlier work, giving it a more muscular, swaggering sound while keeping that emotional vulnerability. The album hit the top five in Australia, Finland, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, top ten in the US and UK. Not bad for a kid who was playing two hundred capacity clubs that weren't even selling out just a year earlier, and then came the Grammy nomination for Best New Artists. Somber slept through the live stream announcement and woke up to his phone exploding with messages. I was playing two hundred cap clubs that weren't selling out, He said, Why am I even expecting that to happen? But it did happen.

10:35 Here's why I wanted to tell you about Somber and back to Friends. This is a song about trying to return to something you can't get back. How can we go back to being friends when we just shared a bed? You can't. That moment changed everything. There's no going back. But it's also a story about refusing to return to what wasn't working. For two and a half years, PSM was making music that sounded like what he thought people wanted, songs that felt strategic, songs designed to recapture the virality of Caroline, and none of them worked. Then he stopped trying to be what the industry wanted and started being what he actually was. He went back to his bedroom, back to the same cheap mic and the same upright piano and the same DIY setup, back to making music for himself, and the world finally caught up. There's no shortcut, there's no formula. The path from bedroom to breakthrough isn't a straight line. It's a spiral. You return to where you started, but you're not the same person anymore. You've learned things, You've failed enough times to know what matters.

11:45 You're ready. Somber released back to Friends during the deadest week of the year, and then waited three months for TikTok to notice it. Then he waited another ten months for it to crack the top ten. That's over a year of patients of trusting that may making something real would eventually matter more than making something viral. And here's what I love most. He's only nineteen. He's already lived through a viral moment, a record deal, two and a half years of commercial failure, and a slow building breakthrough hit. He slept through his Grammy nomination announcement, because at this point he's just focused on the work. That's the marker of someone building a career, not chasing a moment. Sometimes you can't go back to being friends. Sometimes you can't go back to making music the way you used to.

12:32 Sometimes you can't pretend you're someone you've never met. Sometimes the only direction that works is forward. Make what you want to make, release it when you're ready, and trust that if it's real, if it's true, the audience will find it. That's not naivety, that's not wishful thinking. That's what happened to a kid from New York who dropped out of high school, signed a record deal at seventeen, released twenty songs that didn't hit, then made one more in his bedroom that changed everything. How can we go back? We can't. We don't. We move forward. That's the only direction that matters.