An attempt to decode the world’s ongoing obsession with Cigarettes After Sex.
It sounds good. It really does. For someone who has never truly understood the buzz around Cigarettes After Sex, finally sitting down to actively listen to their latest album, X’s — while I may or may not also be scrolling through Instagram — has given me new reasons to listen to them again. If you don’t scrutinise the overtly suggestive lyrics of course, which I have learned is already slightly less sapphic and lustful as compared to its predecessors.
Atmospheric, ambient, slowcore, dreamy; there’s nothing like some millennial ennui that can further stimulate the constantly running TikTok machine. Ironically, this sudden overexposure of frontman Greg Gonzalez’s diary to the hungry, prying eyes of the Gen Zs and Gen Alphas mirrors how the band’s music first came into the millennials’ field of vision. The first LP I., which Gonzalez has described as “an accident” and “experiment”, came out in 2012 — before the name of the band even came into existence — but it was only in 2016 that their listeners started to grow in number via organic recommendations and shares of their live performances on Youtube. Yet, the same trance-like, reverb-heavy sound that is essentially the antithesis to virality has found its way into the flighty feeds of today’s chronically online youth, and stuck. But why?
X’S
Judging just off the sonic characteristics of the music, it’s a bliss-out style that lulls and lingers exactly like a haze of exhaled smoke in the air. Actually, much of the band’s discography can probably be played one after the other to form a single, flowing stream of consciousness. Especially if you consider how these songs are just Greg’s (often suggestive) thoughts transmuted into poetry. It’s wallflower music with optional poignance, and for anyone who has ever found themselves tangled up in the romantics of youth and 2010 indie-ness (or peer pressured into feeling seen after watching the once anthemic coming-of-age film Perks Of Being a Wallflower), this is what an ideal era of youth would sound like if it were metamorphosed into music.
So it is bad to be predictable? Does it mean sameness in music is bad? Not exactly. Not everyone is on the constant lookout for novelty. This persistent, melodic drone and the band’s fidelity to it means Cigarettes After Sex is effectively immune to the trend game — the gears that have kept the music industry spinning ever since the charts became a bon ton means of distinguishing good music from better ones. Analytically, there’s absolutely no sense of chase in the rhythmic strums and hits even in Baby Blue Movie — the closest thing the band has to anything ‘upbeat’ — because it’s just not in Gonzalez’s nature to give critics and naysayers lip service. In fact, it’s just not in the nature of most indie rock or shoegaze bands (like Slowdive) to stray far from their nascent musician sentiments, even when the things they sing about no longer apply to their present-day lives — and people love them for it.
Baby Blue Movie
It’s also important to note that though the chronically online are happily self-diagnosed with ‘brainrot’, they still seek an identity and a means of differentiation even while being a member of the masses; knowing Cigarettes After Sex and then becoming die-hard evangelists of them when everyone has the attention span of a fruit fly portrays taste. It’s also a clarion call to the millennials and Gen Zs who actually had these be-all-end-all love stories that Apocalypse, Cry and more are about, and — while arguable — a desire for those younger to feel seen even by them.
And it’s not just the impression of maturity by association with the artist and genre that they are after — it’s also about maturity to appreciate the content of these songs. Gonzalez is a poet laureate who imagines the most vulnerable, visceral, and intimate moments of romantic relationships — sex is only as natural as the romance that allows it to bloom.
Tejano Blue
Reading them as the “erotic lullabies” he so describes is a more intense experience than listening to it being sung; the language is clear and as straight to the point as it is intense, and universally so: “Your lips, my lips / apocalypse”; “I’ll find a way to slip into your skin somehow”; “I always will make it feel like you were the last one”; “And when you go away / I still see you / The sunlight on your face in my rearview” and many, many more. Nothing too flashy or far-fetched, just heart-worn-on-the-sleeve kind of simple that is gentle enough to sideline, but at an easy enough reach to pull into focus if you wanted to. It’s about this option to stand still in solitude and feel if you so please, or not feel at all.
To disappear into the numbing but singular blur of Gonzalez’s wafting voice — perhaps this is why the band has such a huge following internationally, the distillation of love, lust and longing transcending the boundaries of language.
Ultimately, the music continues to enrapture even the Gen Z and Gen Alpha because that’s just the age where we romanticise everything in life; you are the main character in your own storyline, and Cigarettes After Sex makes the perfect kind of introspective music to soundtrack this pensive stage of life. Not everyone will hone in on the lyrics when listening; we are so often distracted by a million other types of media anyway. What really gets the crowd (even today) is mood listening, which is choosing music that reflects specific emotions instead of the artist and genre. Perhaps the very function of being able to pair music to static images on TikTok and Instagram multiplies this effect. But it undoubtedly is this kind of balm-like meditative music that we somehow need in a life of constant overstimulation, the salve we need to deal with the messy melange of information our digital lives burden us with today.