When he was growing up in El Paso, Texas, Greg Gonzalez dreamed of one day emulating “massive global phenomena” such as Metallica or Queen. So it was a crushing disappointment when the first EP by his band Cigarettes After Sex, 2012’s I, went absolutely nowhere.
“I felt like a failure,” he admits. Over the next four years, the EP picked up a small amount of traction. “But I was still playing little venues in New York and no one was showing up.”
Then, in 2016, lead track Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby suddenly went viral. “I started getting notifications,” he says. “Then I was getting an email every second. This went on for days. I’d been bubbling away under the surface for years, then almost overnight it was like lightning struck.”
After that, as he puts it, “the dam broke”. Cigarettes After Sex’s 2017 single Apocalypse has been streamed more than a billion times and this year his band headline New York’s hallowed Madison Square Garden and play two nights at London’s 20,000-capacity O2. “It’s everything I wished for,” he says.
As the singer-songwriter concedes, Cigarettes After Sex’s sensual dream-pop isn’t the sort of music that usually fills arenas. “It’s bedroom music,” he chuckles. “People tell me they put our music on to go to sleep, which is a compliment.”
However, the band’s hushed, reverb-heavy sound has made them perfect for a certain type of Spotify playlist – “Sad Indie”, “Songs for Rainy Days” – not to mention other sorts of bedroom playlists reflecting the band’s name and some of their more explicit lyrics. Gonzalez’s voice – so androgynous that “Is the Cigarettes After Sex singer a woman?” is a common Google search – only adds to the eroticism. It also chimes with the resurgence of slowcore, the minimal, snail-paced indie genre that has blown up with generation Z on TikTok in recent years and generated renewed interest in artists from 90s also-rans Duster to the Cocteau Twins. The latter are a huge influence on Cigarettes After Sex. “There’s something so otherworldly and unknowable about their sound,” says Gonzales. “It exists in a different plane.”
Gonzalez’s inspirations also include Julee Cruise, whose ethereal voice entranced a generation via David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet and TV series Twin Peaks. “Julee Cruise is definitely coming from a place that we are,” he explains, “and the way Lynch’s movies use late-1950s/early-60s songs such as Roy Orbison’s In Dreams; they’re beautiful melodies which feel nostalgic and have a kind of gravity to them, but feel surreal.”
Significantly, though, Gonzales doesn’t see Cigarettes After Sex as weird or arthouse, and their earworm songs follow timeless, classic structures. “It’s definitely pop music to me,” he says. “I love the term dream-pop, but I’m more concerned with writing immortal love songs like the ones I loved growing up: the Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Marvin Gaye. I’d like to write a song that becomes a standard.” Perhaps with Apocalypse he already has.
It all seems to add up to a formula for world domination by stealth (though Gonzalez prefers to call it “being sneaky”). His band’s hypnotically beautiful songs generally bypass mainstream radio, and there hasn’t been a conventional hit single or eye-catching video; instead, Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby conquered YouTube with a single, monochrome image of a woman leaning backwards.
Their gigs present the black-clad band (Gonzalez, vocals and guitar; Randall Miller, bass; Jacob Tomsky, drums) in near darkness. Fittingly, for our video call, Gonzalez opts not to turn his camera on, so I’m interviewing a black screen. “I used to wonder: ‘What kind of artist would I like?’” the 41-year-old explains. “Mystery invites you in. It makes your brain go crazy in a nice way and you want to solve the riddle. Like [another Lynch film] Mulholland Drive.”
Growing up, Gonzalez’s father worked in video movie distribution. “So I had a closet of a thousand movies. I always thought: ‘How can I write a song like a movie, where you picture a scene in your mind?’” (Perhaps fittingly, when he moved to New York after the release of that first EP, he spent a period managing a cinema in Manhattan.) He’d initially formed Cigarettes After Sex in 2008 as a New Order/Erasure-type electropop band, but after pouring more emotions into the songs he recorded the first EP in an echoey stairwell at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he’d been a “terrible” music student a decade before. “You’d walk in that stairway and all of a sudden it felt like you were in outer space,” he remembers. “I always thought: ‘Wow, we should get a band in here.’” Once he did, the Cigarettes sound was born.
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Gonzalez’s lyrics are romantic, sensual and occasionally very sexual. Witness lyrics such as Kiss It Off Me’s “Saw you on the side of the road / I could see you were walking slow, drinking a Slurpee / In a peach baseball cap, falling in my lap / You were so thirsty.”
“It’s hard for me to express emotions, but I feel things very deeply and can process them in the songs,” he says. “I write about situations to get to the heart of what I felt. Yes, some lyrics might be a bit dirtier or a bit much for some people, but to tell the story I have to be honest and leave in details that others wouldn’t.”
Gonzalez rejects the suggestion that any of the lyrics might objectify women. “I’m not saying ‘every women needs to be this way,’” he argues. “Absolutely not. The songs are little love letters to that person … compliments on what they were wearing, their hair … it’s very personal.”
Forthcoming third album X’s details the four-year rise and fall of his last serious relationship with trademark candour. The song Dark Vacay describes an initially blissful union that ran aground during a vacation to the pyramids, although it seems the line “I listen to the last message that you left, then the voice from the suicide hotline” has a dollop of poetic licence.
“It’s metaphorical for that intense feeling of: ‘I wish I wasn’t here today,’” Gonzalez explains. “Then you get past it.” He says he is constantly amazed by the number of people who tell him that such songs tell their stories, too. “They’re my stories, but anyone can share them,” he suggests. “That’s why I want this to be as big as possible, because that will mean it’s powerful.”
X’s is released on 12 July. Cigarettes After Sex play the O2, London, on 12 & 13 November.