Find everything you log into your account
Find everything you save in your account
Greg Gonzalez enters the Chateau Marmont dressed in the same old black, from his Ray-Bans to his Tecova boots. With his graying beard and rolled up sleeves, he can pass for an art director of a virtual marketing company or an independent. The film veteran is now in a position to convince you of the artistic dangers that are still imaginable on streaming services. Their presence doesn’t create an electric wave of popularity in the room, however, for Gonzalez, that relative anonymity is intentional.
González is truly the founder, singer, guitarist, composer, producer and aesthetic advisor of the band Cigarrillos After Sex, whose songs have been listened to billions of times. Later this year, they will headline a tour across the United States and Europe, adding two sold-out shows at Inglewood’s Kia Forum and two dates at London’s O2. In early 2025, they will travel to Australia, South Africa and Asia. One of the stops is the Beach City International Stadium in Jakarta, Indonesia, a city where they currently have around 600,000 listeners per month on Spotify, more than double that of Los Angeles.
For nearly a decade, the band, which also includes bassist Randall Miller and drummer Jacob Tomsky, has cast a spell on its listeners with songs about love, lust and desire. The tempos are slow and dreamy, like a mist of ether, and the lyrics are direct, intimate and obscene. After a five-year gap since their last album, they released their third album, X’s, last week.
On this hot summer day, González sits in a corner of Marmont’s lobby and orders a mint tea that he sweetens with honey. In person, his voice is deep and thoughtful, not like the high-pitched, breathless voices in his songs. , encouraged through the singers he loves, like Sade, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Julee Cruise and the recently deceased French singer Françoise. Robust. ” When I first heard this album, The Question, which is still my favorite album of all the time, “It’s like, oh, that’s precisely the feeling I want,” she says. “It’s precisely the voice I’d like to have, just natural beauty.
He lives nearby in Laurel Canyon. It’s his third home in 4 years in Los Angeles, but he feels like he’s just starting to get a feel for the city: where he needs to be a regular, who his friends are, how to find his way around him. “Everywhere I go, I feel like a foreigner,” she says. “I just feel like I was never intended to be a component of a scene or anything, and that’s how Cigarettes feels too. “
Gonzalez is 41 years old and was born in El Paso, Texas. In the late 2000s, when he was in his twenties, he came up with the idea of Cigarettes After Sex. Well, an edition of Cigarettes After Sex. At the time, he made money in his hometown playing bass in jazz bands and Top 40 covers, or doing solo acoustic guitar gigs where he sang songs through Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers.
The initial concept of Cigarettes After Sex was to create songs with fair lyrics, such as “Famous Blue Raincoat” or Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2”, but with music encouraged through new wave and synth pop bands such as Erasure, New Order and Madonna’s debut. González’s lyrics had a more bitter aspect at the time, so he gradually got rid of the confessional component and tried to be more poetic. The music has become darker and more reverberant, like the chain of Jesus and Mary. Then, in 2012, he went through a particularly tricky year (a close friend died, he was damaged) and fell under the spell of the Cowboy Junkies’ album, The Trinity Session, which had his song “Sweet Jane. “Gonzalez heard that the select Canadian country band only employed one microphone at Trinity, so he had to cut it all out on Cigarettes After Sex. He returns to confessional lyrics, exorcises their acidity, and adopts an anti-sound production approach, seeking to recall the days of Buddy Holly or Records of the Sun.
Gonzalez recorded I. , a four-song EP, on a stairwell at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he had been a student, with the goal of creating anything that sounded, as he put it, like “It’s my party. “Lesley Gore, still taking painkillers. He soon moved to New York, pursuing the visions of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and Martin Scorsese. Years passed, he played bass in a funk band, worked in an Upper East Side movie theater and directed. At the poorly attended Cigarettes After Sex shows, Gonzalez believed that if his band ever achieved success, it would be because the music press would notice and defend them, as he had noticed with other Brooklyn bands.
By 2015, he was in debt and his bandmates had left town before completing an album. The band released a new single called “Affection” without much attention. Then one day, out of nowhere, he started getting notifications that other people were listening. to cigarettes after sex on YouTube. Permanently. A fan had uploaded the band’s music to the platform and now it was going viral. Once Cigarettes After Sex created its own official account, the number of subscribers reached millions. “I don’t forget to be in bed sobbing,” Gonzalez says. I thought, ‘Wow, anyway anything happened. It was like a storm and it was very intense. ‘
They soon booked a tour of Europe and signed with the independent label Partisan Records. The label learned that the band’s good fortune was more than just a story of knowledge and that not only was there an engaged fanbase, but it also had the ability to grow. “We were looking to figure out what Greg’s vision was, and he thought they could become a big cult band,” says Zena White, now Partisan’s operations lead. “So our North Star was to paint so that they would become the biggest cult band. band of the world. “
Because Cigarettes After Sex still employs guitar, bass and drums, it can be tricky to separate them from the bars of rock hit.
Lizzy Szabo, who oversees many Spotify playlists as an independent publisher of the virtual streaming platform, notes that 75% of Cigarettes After Sex listeners on the service are Gen Z or younger. “If you’re in your 20s and 25s, you start your independent life. ” “In adult life, you fall in love with and romanticize the things you do,” she says. “It makes perfect sense that it’s so popular. “
Many listeners come to Spotify and interact in ambient listening, looking for music based on an emotion or situation, not an artist or genre. The songs from Cigarettes After Sex have become mainstays of curated playlists like Sad Indie and generative playlists like Make Out Jams. They also integrate seamlessly into popular and confusing playlists like My Life is a Movie and Levitate. “It’s introspective music,” says Szabo. You can actually apply it to your life or just fall into it or think it’s a game of chance and just allow it to provide the soundtrack to what you’re doing. “The organization has been described as “ambient pop,” a nod to the low-key genre that Brian Eno pioneered, though “ambient pop” might be a more apt description.
González’s words are not full of hidden meanings. The emotions are transparent and declarative, as if I were writing a letter about her. In fact, it occasionally shows the lyrics of the songs to the user in question before recording them. I had that shyness that makes it difficult to explicitly express to someone what you feel,” he says. “You can do it, but it’s more productive to do it in a song and paint precisely the picture of how you feel about that user. Healing for me, for sure.
This simplicity is also helping Cigarettes After Sex go beyond potential language barriers, which is why its foreign audience remains so broad. “These are beautiful songs about love and love is a universal feeling,” explains White. “Honesty simply makes other people feel seen. Probably in very Western cultures it is not radical, however, in some cultures it is radical to communicate about love in that way. And other people are attracted to that because art makes you feel understood in that sense.
Just as Leonard Cohen once sang about “putting your head on an unmade bed,” González also peppers his song with particular references to sexuality, adding that he calls one lover “the patron saint of sucking cock” or says that another never desires tell him when she cums. Because she still feels it. She says those moments should be fun, not perverse or mocking. “I liked the concept that in relationships you can say dirty things, but at the same time sweet things,” she says. “It just seemed fair. ” He also recognizes that those lines are the ones that the public sings loudest at concerts.
Cigarettes After Sex’s new album, X’s, is largely about a recent relationship of González’s that has since ended. He was living with a friend for the first time in her life, new to Los Angeles and at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a scenario he describes as “very complex and difficult. ” In “Hideaway,” he wistfully describes a day together drinking wine at unpopular parties, and in “Dreams From Bunker Hill,” he highlights a couple who decide to stay together because they feel increasingly distant from each other.
González tried to update X’s production a little, advancing it a few decades in his references, but still landing in the twentieth century. He was drawn to the dark romanticism of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, as well as the fresh, grown-up pop of the ’80s and early ’90s: deeply uncool but undeniable ballads like “It Must Have Been Love” via Roxette, “Right Here. “”via Richard Marx Waiting” and “Rush Rush” via Paula Abdul These were some of the first songs he liked, watching their music videos on VH1 before dismissing them as tacky as a teenager and adopting steel bands, haunting English bands and. the experimental sounds of John ZornArray
On the remarkable “Silver Sable,” González references listening to those comfortable hits in the darkness of her bedroom, evoking reminiscence of her formative years and a page from the Marvel Swimsuit special, but then transposes it to a friend of the times moderns on the scene with him. Array “There was a kind of dreaminess to all of this,” she says. He now exists in an area completely outside of time, capable of being discovered by unborn generations when they enter “excited,” “depressed,” or “nostalgic” into the future-seeking bars.
More from GQ
Connect