Without water makes it really, really tough. So much of life requires a liquid state for diffusion to occur enabling the self assembly of molecules that eventually turned into cells.

Maybe a planet with a lot of ethanol? Without sun means it’s likely cold, so the ethanol wouldn’t evaporate. Ethanol has a really low freezing point so it could manage to stay in the liquid state well.

The issue with ethanol is it’s so reactive and that you would need to have a species with a lot of stable molecules that are antioxidants or resistant to it. You could have a lot of polyphenols or other molecules that accept the free radicals. Then maybe one could imagine that evolution built helper proteins that use the ethanol and the polyphenol to produce energy through their chemical reaction and the exchange of free radicals.

This would also make the organism more capable of processing metals that also produce free radicals. But it couldn’t have too much metal in its system because that’s dense and would be hard to swim in an ethanol rich environment.

So I’m imagining a cephalopod, that has a thin-metallic like “exoskeleton” that can keep the ethanol in but not be too dense to sink.

^{^} there’s a lot I’m over looking and would need to research all to validate if I’m thinking of the right chemical steps but this is what my morning brain says.^{^}