Cigarettes After Sex the American dream pop band formed in El Paso, Texas, in 2008 by Greg Gonzalez. The band is known for its ethereal, limerent, and often dream-like musical style, lyrics often based on the themes of love and romance, as well as Gonzalez’s voice, which has been described as androgynous. While marketed as an ambient pop band, Cigarettes After Sex are maybe considered to be shoegaze, slowcore and indie rock.
The band’s debut extended play, ” I.”, was released in 2012, with the song “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” eventually becoming a bit of a sleeper hit through commercial licensing. After the release of the standalone single “Affection” in 2015, the band released their self-titled debut studio album in 2017 to positive reviews. The second Cigarettes After Sex studio album, “Cry”, followed in 2019. A third album, “X’s”, was released in July 2024.
Cigarettes After Sex According to Gonzalez, the name came to thought after he had a “friendship with certain benefits” with a woman who smoked after they were together.
In 2012, the band recorded their debut EP,” I.“, in a four-story stairway at his alma mater, University of Texas at El Paso, calling the experience “basically an accident; kind of an experiment”. The EP’s cover art used a photograph by Man Ray, titled “Anatomies”, which featured Lee Miller with her head thrown back. In 2015, they later relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where the band’s single “Affection” was recorded and released in 2015 along with a cover of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You”.
Around early 2016, years following the release of ” I.”, Cigarettes After Sex gained recognition after a fan upload of their song “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” which became popular on YouTube. That same year, the band signed onto Partisan Records, and released their first single under the label, “K.”, in November .
On March 21, 2017, the band announced their debut studio album, Cigarettes After Sex. On the same day, they released the second single from the album, “Apocalypse”. In May they unveiled the album’s third single “Each Time You Fall in Love”. Their self-titled album was released in its entirety on June 9, 2017, being their first full-length release under Partisan Records.
In August 2019 the band announced their second studio album, titled “Cry”, along with the single “Heavenly”. The album was released on October 2019.
With the combination of band name and album title this one’s always going to be a bit of a tearjerker, packed with self-reflection and self-loathing. No regrets, though, as Greg Gonzalez muses on sensuality, the loss of those we care about, the loss of self to another and the endless yearning of the human heart. Shades of Lord Huron and a wealth of gloomy shoegazers can be felt, but even though “Cry” represents a next step for Cigarettes After Sex – edging into more minimalistic territories – it’s still immediately identifiable as this band, and so won’t fail to instantly resonate with avid fans. Packed with an exquisite, opiate balladry at once heartfelt and heartbroken, it’s hard to tell whether this is exactly what you need to hear when living through your blue period or precisely what you shouldn’t listen to. Either way, it’s quiet impact is immense.
The band released the single “You’re All I Want” in 2020, and later released a single titled “Pistol”, in November 2022.
In July 2023, the band released a pair of singles, “Bubblegum” and “Stop Waiting”. In December 2023, the band released a cover of Radiohead’s song “Motion Picture Soundtrack”.
February 2024, the band announced their third studio album” X’s”. On the same day, they also announced that they would embark on the X’s World Tour in support of the album, taking place throughout 2024 and 2025, and released its lead single “Tejano Blue”, in which Gonzalez stated was inspired by his years growing up in his hometown. To further the album’s promotion, “Dark Vacay” was released on April 2024, as the album’s second single, with “Baby Blue Movie” following it on June 2024. “X’s” was released on July 2024, to favourable reception.
October 2025, the band released another single, an original song titled “Anna Karenina” which was named after the novel and a cover of The Doors’ song “The Crystal Ship”. April 2026, Gonzalez was as a special guest for Karol G’s headlining set at Coachella 2026, joining her onstage where they performed a new track, “Después de Ti”, which later saw an official release on streaming platforms on April, May 2026, the band released the single “Twizzler”.
Cry
With the combination of band name and album title this one’s always going to be a bit of a tearjerker, packed with self-reflection and self-loathing. No regrets, though, as Greg Gonzalez muses on sensuality, the loss of those we care about, the loss of self to another and the endless yearning of the human heart. a wealth of gloomy shoegazers can be felt, but even though “Cry” represents a next step for Cigarettes After Sex – edging into more minimalistic territories – it’s still immediately identifiable as this band, and so won’t fail to instantly resonate with avid fans. Packed with an exquisite, opiate balladry at once heartfelt and heartbroken, it’s hard to tell whether this is exactly what you need to hear when living through your blue period or precisely what you shouldn’t listen to. Either way, it’s quiet impact is immense.
In a feature for Noisey by Vice, Christina Cacouris describes Cigarettes After Sex as “elemental, hazy and romantic, but with a noir edge underneath Gonzalez’s voice” as well as “sweet and sentimental”. “As the band’s name suggests, it’s reminiscent of lying in bed, but its ambient qualities don’t prevent it from being music you can dance to.” Gonzalez cites Françoise Hardy as his favourite singer and Miles Davis as having great impact. In an interview he also noted films such as L’Avventura and The Double Life of Veronique were influential to the feel and sound of the music in “Affection” and their LP. The band also includes the Cowboy Junkies’ album The Trinity Session, Julee Cruise, and Cocteau Twins as influences. The music blog Eardrums Music describes the band as “slow, dreamy and beautiful with gorgeous, tender vocals and very good lyrics” and compares it to Mazzy Star. Music bloggers behind Swell Tone describe Cigarettes After Sex as a band producing “melancholy, slow pop that will sweetly rock any listener into a listless stupor.”
Clocking in at nine songs, “Cry” is a compact collection but its brevity belies its depth. While the band’s sound may be most associated with the romantic pop music of the late 50s and early 60s, Greg Gonzalez pushes into more unexpected sonic territory on “Cry”, reaching back to his childhood in El Paso, Texas, to draw subtle melodic influence from 90s Tejano stars like Selena and mainstream pop country artists like Shania Twain.
Gonzalez pushes himself lyrically on the album too, tackling sex with the graphic frankness of Henry Miller or Leonard Cohen as he renders unabashed, sometimes explicitly erotic scenes with a casual candour. Writing with a filmmaker’s eye, he captures tiny moments with a rich, cinematic detail that manages to locate the profound within the mundane.
Cigarettes After Sex continue to defy what it means to be one of the biggest cult bands in the world. Five years from the release of their breakout self-titled debut, they have recently seen several viral moments on TikTok unlock new levels of audience growth and album sales. At almost 15M monthly listeners on Spotify and climbing, they are currently the 343rd highest streamed artist on the platform. As the debut album re-enters Top 200 charts globally (including US+UK), Cigarettes After Sex have returned with their first new music in over two years, “Pistol,” a song that brings together all of the elements that have made CAS such a celebrated band, while also introducing a subtle yet impactful increase in tempo. Equal parts transportive and romantic, the song’s driving rhythm meets a stark, minimalistic atmosphere that is given dimension by dreamy, washed-out guitars, swelling synths, and intimate, yearning vocals from Greg Gonzalez.
released November 2022
“Bubblegum” and “Stop Waiting” are the latest pair of singles from Cigarettes After Sex, and was their first new music of 2023. The double single will be released on Tuesday July Syrupy, sensual, subterranean dream-pop is set against vocals from bandleader Greg Gonzalez that walk the subtle line between croon and whisper. The songs are a perfect distillation of the starry-eyed atmosphere that the band has claimed as their signature in the six years since the release of their globally successful self-titled debut. Behind billions of streams and over 17M monthly listeners on Spotify, Cigarettes After Sex continue to defy what it means to be one of the biggest cult bands in the world.
Reviewing “Affection” for Independentmusicnews.com, Jae Pyl concludes that “there’s just such an intimacy to Cigarettes After Sex’s sound that it’s impossible to not let it into the pit of your belly.”
The opening track on Cigarettes After Sex’s self-titled debut album is a slow-as-molasses alt-rock ballad simply titled “K.” It chronicles lead singer Greg Gonzalez’s infatuation with a girl named Kristen, and pinpoints the very moment their relationship shifts from strictly casual to something more substantial. “We had made love earlier that day, with no strings attached/But I could tell that something had changed,” Gonzalez croons in a voice close to a whisper. And while he seems to have cinched the deal with the girl in question, the song ends on an elusive note: “Stay with me/I don’t want you to leave…”
Kristen’s initial is also the death knell of modern romantic communication, the wretched abbreviation for “OK,” the text message equivalent of rejection by indifference. Without a doubt, Cigarettes After Sex is an album of love songs, but it’s tempered with a millennial ennui that gives the songs an extra layer of relevance in 2017. Instead of relying on lovey-dovey, pastoral lyrics to tell stories of budding relationships, each song is set to a backdrop of ultra-downbeat dream pop, its somber moods leaking into fleeting vignettes of sexy iPhone videos and bittersweet hookups. The record plays like a cryptic guidebook to navigating the world of contemporary love affairs, or the slightly depressing diary of some 21st century Don Juan.
Sonically, Cigarettes After Sex is an impressively even-keeled, slowcore collection—so even-keeled that it borders on ambient. It’s easy to write a bunch of slow songs with similar chords, but it’s an altogether different feat to produce, mix, and compile them in a way that their similarities become their strengths, gradually setting an unshakable mood. At first the repetition of certain elements—echoing guitars, soft hi-hats, elastic basslines—seems overbearing. But after multiple listens, Cigarettes After Sex’s less-is-more ethos is clear, and their heady melange of several genres of subdued indie rock begins to make more sense.
The album possesses strong aspects of alt-country in its reverberated, plucked guitars and shuffling snares, immediately bringing to mind groups like Cowboy Junkies and Mojave 3. But then you encounter a track like “Sunsetz,” whose dreamy intro owes a considerable debt to mid-era Cocteau Twins, before dropping almost all instrumentation in its verse to showcase Gonzalez’s boyish vocals. “Sunsetz” is so loose, and with so much space, that it should be boring; instead, it’s electric, the emptiness forcing you to focus on Gonzalez’s stark lyrics and clever composition. “So you open your dress and show me your tits/On the swing set at the old playground,” he sings, not really as a command, but almost as a general observation.
The theme of sexual encounters as fodder for quiet introspection continues throughout Cigarettes After Sex, but it’s delivered in such a nonchalant way that it avoids corniness. “Sweet” opens with the line “Watching the video that you sent me/The one where you’re showering with wet hair dripping,” before turning into a song about longing to touch a loved one’s skin through a screen. A catchy late-album highlight, “Truly”’s chorus goes, “Truly, know that you really don’t need/To be in love to make love to me.”
Much like relationships themselves, these songs are full of contradictions. The objects of Gonzalez’s desire are both achingly close and tantalizingly far, in his phone and in his bed, on his couch and in his head. Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.
X’s
Monochrome dream pop band Cigarettes After Sex release their third studio album “X’s”, following up the pre-release ‘Tejano Blue’. As romantic and wistful as ever, the album is an avowed haunt-jaunt through a series of ‘slow-dance pop ballads’ – no change there – albeit this time concerning the brutal reckoning with relationship breakdown and loss, personally borne by lead musician Greg Gonzalez during the recording of their prior self-titled album. Also a lover letter to Gonzalez’ hometown of El Paso, Texas, the album draws on themes of the music scene and atmosphere of the city, in dialogue with a subsequent move to New York and the culture shock that followed
With ” X’s”, Cigarettes After Sex finally takes centre stage as not just one of today’s preeminent indie bands, but as one of the most globally accomplished acts across any genre. Their often unconventional path to superstardom has helped reshape the very definition of success for artists in the modern era.
Filled with raw, imagistic, sometimes smutty vignettes set to entrancing, slowburn pop songs, bandleader Greg Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. But where previous albums have drawn from an amalgam of relationships, “X’s” centralizes on just one relationship that spanned four years.
“The record feels brutal,” admits Gonzalez. “I could sit and talk about this loss to someone, but that wouldn’t scratch the surface. I have to really write about it, sing about it, have the music, and then I can start to analyze and learn from it. Or just relive it—in a good way. I don’t have that Eternal Sunshine-thing of wanting to forget.”
While continuing to observe classic pop song structures, Gonzalez has moved away from the prior sonic touchstones of the ’50s and ’60s, finding himself now drawn to a ’70s/’80s slow dance. While (in typical Cigarettes style) these changes may be subtle, the overall resulting energy is akin to disco ball-refracted tears on the dance floor.
Cigarettes After Sex’s “Twizzler” is arguably the most upbeat (dare we say uptempo?) track the band has ever committed to record: a standalone single in the most exciting sense of the term, existing slightly outside their established orbit while losing none of the dreamy, slow-burn sensuality that’s made them one of the most-streamed bands in the world. Greg Gonzalez’s hushed, unmistakable vocal still floats at the center, but everything around it feels brighter and more buoyant, stitched together from cinematic snapshots of a sun-drunk romance, a moon necklace at the Standard West, lips to a Twizzler outside the Cinerama Dome, a whispered promise. It’s a Cigs song through and through, just one that happens to be smiling.
released May 2026
The Fat Angel Sings 