Cigarettes After Sex
Greg Gonzalez's El Paso band, marketed as ambient pop, whose 2017 debut holds "Apocalypse", a song that found a second audience on TikTok.
El Paso to Brooklyn
Cigarettes After Sex was formed in El Paso, Texas in 2008 by Greg Gonzalez. The debut EP I. was self-released on July 21, 2012, recorded in a four-story stairway at the University of Texas at El Paso; Gonzalez called it basically an accident; kind of an experiment, and he recalled that no one was talking about it. Its cover is Man Ray's Anatomies. The band moved to Brooklyn in 2015, released "Affection" with a cover of REO Speedwagon's "Keep On Loving You", and in 2016 a fan upload of "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby" on YouTube took off and brought a Partisan contract. That song later appeared in The Handmaid's Tale, Shameless and The Sinner.
Gonzalez names Francoise Hardy, Miles Davis, Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session, Julee Cruise and the Cocteau Twins as influences, along with Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, the Doors, Bill Frisell and Joy Division, the films L'Avventura and The Double Life of Veronique, and the writer Richard Brautigan. The band is now Gonzalez with the bassist Randy Miller, who also does the graphic design, and the drummer Jacob Tomsky.
Albums
Cigarettes After Sex was released on June 9, 2017, 47:04, produced by Gonzalez and recorded in December 2015 in Brooklyn and May 2016 in Manhattan, most songs live with a small audience. He described the landscape he wanted to convey as like a night-time beach with a wildfire. It reached 27 in the UK, went platinum in the US, gold in the UK and double platinum in France and Poland; the Guardian's Alexis Petridis gave it four stars and Pitchfork's Cameron Cook 7.4.
Cry followed on October 25, 2019 (40:26, mixed by Craig Silvey, which Gonzalez described as a film shot in Mallorca) and X's on July 12, 2024 (38:13, recorded in Los Angeles between August 2020 and February 2022, reaching 12 in the UK and 32 in the US). The band toured arenas on the X's World Tour in 2024 and 2025, including the O2 in London on November 13, 2024. In October 2025 they released "Anna Karenina" with a cover of the Doors' "The Crystal Ship".
Albums
- Cigarettes After Sex 2017 · Partisan Records
The debut: ten songs, all by Gonzalez, recorded live in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Songs
- Apocalypse Cigarettes After Sex · 2017
The fourth track of the debut album, a single announced alongside it that later went multi-platinum.
Sources
- Cigarettes After Sex, Wikipedia
- Cigarettes After Sex (album), Wikipedia
- Cigarettes After Sex interview, RUSSH (2024-07-17)
- Interview: Cigarettes After Sex, The Reader (2018-04-13)