Cigarettes After Sex

The name that Texas native Greg Gonzalez chose for his band doubles as a pink-neon advertisement for their dream-pop lullabies: carnal, nocturnal, and suffused with a thick haze. But while Cigarettes After Sex seems like a band magically birthed from the darkest recesses of David Lynch’s imagination, they began in 2008 as a recording project spearheaded by Gonzalez while he was studying at the University of Texas at El Paso. And their presence remained as shadowy as their music until—much to the band’s surprise and bewilderment—the 2015 single “Affection” suddenly began racking up tens of millions of hits online. That fluke prodigiously expanded the audience for Gonzalez’s growing repertoire of beautifully enigmatic, sexually charged songcraft, the allure of which is amplified by his uncanny, androgynous voice. The band’s long-gestating, self-titled debut album from 2017 eventually scored platinum sales while still feeling like a word-of-mouth secret, along with its 2019 follow-up, Cry, whose title track Gonzalez wrote in mere minutes. He shared that bit of trivia in a 2024 interview for Elton John’s Apple Music radio show Rocket Hour, before recounting a more drawn-out origin for the songs on 2024’s X’s: “[I wanted to] do something where it’s [three or] four years of writing, and then do something a little tighter, like the first record was, instead of spontaneous.” Gonzalez also wanted to evoke the supple groove of 1970s soul, which comes through on warm, sensual tunes like “Tejano Blue.”