Cigarettes After Sex – X’s review

Many many years ago that so-noughties platform Facebook used to have a thing where you could set your relationship status; in what was a key tool for attention deficit Karens everywhere, one of the choices was “It’s complicated”.

Cigarettes After Sex, the former bedroom project set up by Greg Gonzalez are like that. Their debut EP laid gathering virtual dust for four years until Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby blew up from nowhere, before the 2017 track Apocalypse – now 1.4 billion streams and counting – turned them into one of the century’s biggest cult acts.

At first everything seems very simple. Gonzalez sings in an almost child like pitch and the basic ingredients – guitars, drums, bass, synths, endless reverb – rarely, if ever change. On the surface, everything is very mom’s apple pie, or at least a hip twenties version of that. But the singer is a huge fan of David Lynch, and the same innocent, nightmarish ambience that haunted Julee Cruise’s unofficial Twin Peaks companion Floating Into The Night is also omnipresent.

X’s is the band’s third album, it’s subject matter almost exclusively relating to a doomed relationship Gonzalez is using as catharsis in it’s songs. Getting over it wasn’t easy, as Dark Vacay chronicles, where time together spent ‘On pills and lines’ flips to ‘I listen to the last message that you left/then the voice from the suicide hotline’.

If the confessions here are sometimes unflinching – take Tejano Blue’s ‘We wanted to f*ck like all the time’ – on the likes of Silver Sable, Holding You Holding Me and Baby Blue Movie the songs retain an almost surreal quality, one that makes you long for a dream laden sleep but stay awake all night too. It’s complicated. But then again, what things worth having aren’t.

You can read a full review here.