Cigarettes After Sex Keeps Romance Alive With New Album

Love songs have long been the bread and butter of popular music. They have also shaped our collective cultural understanding of romance through the ages, providing us with a shared love vocabulary, so to speak. But does that mean pop musicians are responsible for keeping romance alive through their songwriting?

"I don't think writers will have to try to keep songs about love alive in that way; it'll simply happen on its own," Greg Gonzalez tells New Times. For the crooning mastermind of Cigarettes After Sex, being an essential worker on the front line of romance is less a duty than a calling. "Love has been a defining factor in my life, so in a way, I can't really help writing about it since it genuinely captures my interest the most."

In a frank appraisal of the genius of Cigarettes After Sex, the substance of Gonzalez's love songs matters just as much as their style. Nevertheless, the band has been primarily defined by its abundance of style thanks to a signature sonic aesthetic right on the nose by any baby-making music standard.

As its name rightly suggests, the band's smokey, reverb-drenched sound evokes all the tender intimacy of two lovers basking in the warmth of a post-coital embrace. If the song "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak was a music genre, then Cigarettes After Sex would be its most masterful proponent on the indie scene today. (That's a compliment to both artists, by the way.)

"Our sound was wildly different at first, actually," says Gonzalez, who founded the project in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, in 2008. Its debut EP release was still a handful of years away, and those embryonic years saw ambivalent, experimental forays into styles ranging from bright electro to dark new wave. That was before life's trials and tribulations led Gonzalez to a creative epiphany.

"Going into 2012 was a very tough time in my life," he says. "I decided then to create music that came from my deepest musical influences and write about honest personal experiences instead of the more informal, style-driven music I was creating before."

Authenticity counts just as much as style for any band worthy of its fans, especially a dedicated purveyor of love songs. For Gonzalez, that means highly personal lyrics that confess unspoken desires, cherish fleeting love moments, and lament the ache of unfulfilled longing.
"Personal experiences are really everything to me regarding my writing," he says. "There are many songs I've written that are basically memoirs, like 'K.' or 'Falling In Love,' for instance. If others tell more of a fictional story, like the song 'Apocalypse,' I'm still singing to and thinking about certain people who were or are very close to me in my life and sometimes picturing them as characters within those songs. There may be a few exceptions, but this is mostly true."

With Gonzalez having found his authentic voice as a lyricist and mastered the band's sonic style on two critically acclaimed albums, one figures the only potential creative challenge left to overcome for Cigarettes After Sex would be recreating the precious intimacy of its studio recordings live on stage.

"Luckily, all the music we've recorded was performed live in what you might call more of an old-fashioned way, so it was very natural to adapt it for our show," Gonzalez explains. "One thing that is a bit different live that has also happened naturally is that the songs can end up being a little more upbeat compared to what the recorded songs feel like. This is usually based on the beautiful, sort of wild receptions we've been lucky enough to receive from audiences. I think it's truly the best and elevates the music for the shows."

Perhaps Miami will get doubly lucky on June 28 by getting to see Cigarettes After Sex perform for the first time and also being the first city on the band's tour to get a preview of brand-new studio material. "We've been working on an album for some time, which I'm hoping to release in the summer of 2024," Gonzalez discloses.

"I'm so excited to finally play Miami," he adds. "It's a very special city for me for romantic reasons. It will be so special to share this connection with our fans in Miami after so many years."

Cigarettes After Sex. 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 28, at FPL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park, 301 Biscayne Blvd, Miami; 305-358-7550; bayfrontparkamphitheater.com. Sold out.