Cigarettes After Sex - Languid harmonies

Floating, weightless, intangible: in just a few years, the music of Cigarettes After Sex has managed to carve out a place in the collective imagination as one of the most iconic and recognizable sounds in contemporary dream-pop. Poetic yet at the same time incredibly explicit in its lyrics, the Texan band has built a soft sonic universe overflowing with sensuality. Gentle guitar arpeggios and unshakeable bass lines lead us into ethereal, melancholy territory. The path the El Paso boys tread picks up the legacy of the many historic groups who came before them. It's not hard to trace in their songs the fluid, feather-light reverb of Cocteau Twins, the introverted romanticism of Slowdive, the magical sensuality of the voice of Mazzy Star, the rarefied atmospheres of Red House Painters. And yet, Greg Gonzalez and company manage to distill years of tradition into a musical proposition that is both innovative and exceptionally pleasurable to listen to.

Cigarettes After Sex rose to prominence through word of mouth online, gaining global recognition in a remarkably short span of time. Now fixtures on the bill at major international festivals, they nonetheless perform at their best in more intimate settings, better suited to the soft magic of their velvety, dreamlike melodies. It can't be said, in fact, that improvisation and spontaneity are the strong points of their live shows. On the contrary, their stage appearances are governed by a rigid, seemingly unvarying protocol. Interaction with the audience is always rather sparse: it is not through direct contact with the crowd that they try to recreate the emotional intensity of their songs.

Far more emphasis is placed on staging, lighting, and everything related to the setting in which they perform. Their almost obsessive reliance on black and white has become proverbial, pervading every aspect of their public image: official show photos, the videos projected in the background, the merchandising. Even the band members themselves, with their all-black looks, don't escape the banning of any other color. This choice is certainly a nod to the timeless allure of Hollywood's golden age, the most romantic era par excellence, when the big screen was populated by great stars, unmatched masters in the art of seduction.

But their preference for chiaroscuro tones also carries a deeper meaning. The placid harmony pervading their music, in fact, is not born of a state of calm but of a constant interplay of contrasts. The languid eroticism of their lyrics collides with a longing for infinity and the union of souls. Just as light and shadow represent opposite effects of the same cause, so too does the eternal ambivalence running through the entire output of Cigarettes After Sex represent the balancing point of their sound. Even the voice of frontman Greg Gonzalez doesn't escape this play of dichotomies. The strikingly androgynous timbre of his singing becomes almost the only possible vehicle through which to express their otherworldly erotic aspirations.

Their performances thus resemble a kind of liturgy in which both carnal and idealized love are celebrated. Dim lighting, minimalist stage design, images of dying fires and starry skies in the background aren't merely decorative elements of the show but invariable, essential parts that serve to wrap the audience in the romantic, elegant spiral of their songs. The band's silhouettes, the stage, the lights, in their repetitiveness, blur to the point of almost disappearing. Their echoing guitars, repeated bass lines, and the small variations binding the chords of their songs imperceptibly hypnotize listeners until the world around them becomes pure abstraction, and the emotions stirred by physical contact, by touching, by making love, become the only tangible reality.

Naturally, for the magic to happen, you need songs capable of conveying these feelings to the listener. Tracks that differ from one another, but not too much, so that the sonic flow appears somehow uniform. And ones soft enough, just to the right degree, to nudge the soul toward a romantic dimension. On their debut album, all these elements coexist in a miraculous balance. Cigarettes After Sex manage, incredibly, to craft tracks that are delicately slowcore yet never tedious, fragile yet at the same time cohesive, remarkably mature despite being part of a first work. Such refinement is extremely rare to replicate. Already on the following record that same freshness is nowhere to be found. And it probably never will be again. After all, this is the one desperate certainty all romantics share: nothing is meant to last forever… you have to savor life in its fleeting transience.

From the beginnings to world tours

There is nothing manufactured about the success of Cigarettes After Sex. Their name reached everyone's lips unexpectedly and unhoped-for, through the grapevine of social networks. Starting out on the fringes of the mainstream music circuit, they managed to break through after years of total anonymity. Their hometown, El Paso, is the quintessential border town. Well known to film lovers thanks to the many directors who have chosen it as a film set (Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Eastwood, to name a few), it's a place with a prestigious tradition in film production.

Greg Gonzalez's family also works in video distribution. The future frontman, not particularly inclined toward schoolwork but fascinated by the big screen, spent his teenage years devouring the many VHS tapes lying around the house. He himself would later admit that, had he not found success in music, he probably would have tried his hand at directing. Fortunately, though, he soon also became passionate about rock and tried putting together a band: Cigarettes After Sex.

The newborn band's first steps gave no hint of a bright future. From its founding in 2008 until 2012, nothing much happens. After four years of amateur gigs, they decide to record four songs on an EP given the none-too-imaginative title I. The chosen location is rather unusual: the stairwell of the University of Texas at El Paso. This helps spread word of their debut locally, but it won't be enough to significantly boost their profile. Not right away, at least. Everything changes, in fact, a couple of years later, when they decide to post the same songs on their YouTube channel. This time, the democratic court of the internet shows clear appreciation for the tender ballad "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby," sending the view count soaring in no time. It's a turning point for the band, which had by then settled into a stable lineup: alongside the frontman on vocals and guitar are Phillip Tubbs on keyboards, Randy Miller on bass and Jake Tomski on drums.

Buoyed by these early positive signs, the following year Gonzalez and co. decide to move to Brooklyn and record the single "Affection." On the same recording they also include a successful ambient-style cover of REO Speedwagon's "Keep On Loving You." Both songs achieve considerable success and help give their career a real boost.

In 2017, in fact, after no fewer than nine years of paying their dues, Cigarettes After Sex manage to get their self-titled debut album produced. Curiously, they decide not to include the hit "Affection" on it, even though it had a sound in keeping with the rest of the album's songs. Their reasoning was that the track had already had its moment and didn't need to be included in the new record's tracklist. Ironically, they would later say they felt an affinity in this decision with the Beatles, who for the same reason had decided not to include "Penny Lane" on their masterpiece "Sgt Peppers."

Nocturnal and minimal (just like its cover art), simple yet effective, the debut by Cigarettes After Sex (2017) lays out stories of small and great loves with tenderness, navigating developments that are sometimes very slow ("Opera House"), presenting with boundless grace sinuous bedroom stories ("K." alone would be worth the price of admission) that unfurl across silk sheets, drawing on musical references both from within indie's traditional canon ("Sunsetz" and "Apocalypse" are 100% Legrand + Scully) and from outside it — "Each Time You Fall In Love" is lifted straight from the most intimate George Michael.

It's a record that can also be pleasant and enveloping ("Truly" and "John Wayne" even retain a certain "immediacy") and one that has won over, without reservation, an enormous army of fans. The opening track is "K.," from which the first single was drawn. It tells of a love gone wrong and a broken heart.

Interpersonal relationships, carnal desire and love are the recurring themes throughout the album. The lyrics often become quite explicit, and women take on a purely aesthetic dimension: a source of joy (when yielding to men's desires) or of melancholy (when distant or emotionally unavailable). And yet Cigarettes After Sex remains an elegant, tasteful album. Gonzalez's androgynous voice lends a poetic seal even to the coarsest words; the rest of the band, as if in a dance, appears and disappears in delicate, almost imperceptible sonic variations. In "Sunsetz," Miller's bass rises unchallenged to accompany the vocals in the chorus; in the following "Apocalypse" it nearly dissolves, overtaken by the drums and the sweet keyboard backdrop. In other tracks, like "Opera House," the instrumental part stays purely in the background, the better to showcase Gonzalez's words.

All in all, it's an excellent debut album that will also achieve solid sales abroad. In no time at all, the Texan band finds itself catapulted into arenas across the globe after years of relative anonymity. Critics, too, tend to be favorable toward their songs, judged to be highly evocative, nocturnal and minimal.

Naturally, though, everyone wants to see how the American quartet would hold up over time. And, judging by the quality of their second record, Cry, released two years after their debut, the hype surrounding them seems set to deflate. Not because there aren't quality songs on it. Just consider the achingly sweet "Heavenly" (with an intro that stops just short of new wave's door). Or "Hentai," a slow ballad in which Gonzalez's androgynous voice lingers over tales of Japanese porn anime amid plucked electric guitars and a melancholy bass line.

Set against these, however, are episodes that are a bit too soporific, lacking any particular musical spark ("You're The Only Good Thing In My Life," "Falling In Love"). But beyond judgments on individual tracks, Cry's most glaring shortcoming is its lack of balance. The magical equilibrium between romanticism and sensuality, between nouvelle vague atmospheres and passionate forays, which defined Cigarettes After Sex, now seems to have vanished.

The erotic narratives on Cry are adolescent fantasies, far removed from the sophisticated decadent visions or the brazen, Brautigan-inspired language of the previous album. Musically, Mazzy Star and Beach House remain among the most obvious reference points.

The hope was that with this second record, Cigarettes After Sex could close the gap with their influences. This time around, at least, they haven't managed it. Their melodies at times seem to coil back on themselves without any real ideas. Bodies seeking each other out, silk sheets, chiaroscuro tones, scented candles, oceans of softness and fragility: it might no longer be enough. The risk of becoming the exclusive property of lovestruck teenage girls prone to easy tears is a real one.

The gestation of the third album X's took what felt like an interminable amount of time. Partly because a new balance had formed within the band: Tubbs decided to pursue a career away from the group, and there was curiosity about how the new line-up would affect their work. On top of that, given the long time spent writing it, there was an expectation that with X's the band would show up with a redefined, refreshed sound.

In November 2022 a new single, "Pistol", was released, which seemed like it might be the prelude to their third album. That turned out not to be the case. In 2023 they put out three more singles, "Bubblegum", "Stop Waiting" and a cover of Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack". None of these would end up on the new record, which is led off by "Tejano Blues", released in winter 2024. The track's sound features some unusual elements for their usual style, with a lively drum pattern and tex-mex blues touches layered over a dream-pop base.

However, the subsequent singles "Dark Vacancy" and "Baby Blue Movie" already revert to the familiar sounds of their previous album and its recurring erotic themes (casual flings and nods to soft porn). In truth, heard in full, the album offers the band's usual care in arrangement and their knack for memorable hooks ("Hideaway", "Holding You, Holding Me"), and the title track is one of its best moments, with a lovely bassline accompanying Greg Gonzalez's androgynous voice. On the other hand, it also includes several filler or less-than-compelling tracks ("Hot" and the closing "Dreams From Bunker Hill" and "Ambient Slide").

Looking back over the lyrics, the record can be read as a concept album charting the arc emotions take through the various phases of a relationship. This thematic progression echoes the band's fondness for cinematic elements, creating a flow that mirrors a kind of narrative thread. The script, however, feels toothless: the static quality and lack of novelty make the album a tough listen in full. The main problem is that Cigarettes After Sex have by now shed the youthful romanticism that first captivated listeners. The themes of sex now feel more like casual bar-room chatter than intimate, evocative exploration. The aroma of cigarettes, once enchanting, has dissipated, leaving behind only the smoke of notes that seem increasingly destined to fade away. For fans of the band's early work, X's may offer a few nostalgic moments, but it also raises concerns about the future direction and sustainability of their artistic vision.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Cigarettes After Sex", "Cry")

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