Cigarettes After Sex Talk New Album ‘X’s’ and India Plans

The seductive, melancholy and dreamy sound of Cigarettes After Sex returns on their third album X’s, released today, Jul. 12, via Partisan Records.

More than a decade after the American band led by frontman Greg Gonzalez rose to fame for taking dream-pop to new places – and sometimes being derided for it – Cigarettes After Sex’s imprint on music is evident in just how many more artists have drawn from their easy-paced yet sometimes explicit storytelling around romance and all the feelings associated with it.

Speaking with Rolling Stone India, Gonzalez says it’s “the highest compliment” when there are other artists trying something similar. “Because music, to me, is a big circle.”

Is there something different about X’s compared to their breakout 2012 EP, the self-titled 2017 album and their 2019 follow-up full-length album Cry? To the hardcore fan, it doesn’t matter. To Gonzalez, there are of course things he’s done differently with bassist Randall Miller and drummer Jacob Tomsky.

X’s thematically centers around memories from Gonzalez’s relationship that lasted four years. He says about the songwriting, “There’s some stuff that’s a little more surreal at times, but then some of it’s very straightforward, too. My favorite stuff is if I can write super matter-of-fact, or where it’s like a memoir, kind of like a journal entry.”

On “Hideaway,” for example, with its lumbering bass to welcome you in, Gonzalez sings about finding his partner “blue in bed.” He says, “I would wonder what’s wrong and ask, ‘Hey, what’s wrong? Let me help you. You want to talk about it?’ She was like, ‘No, if I ever get this way, I don’t ever want to talk about it. If I feel this way, I want you to snap me out of it.’” Within the reverb-heavy, atmospheric minimalism of Gonzalez’s composing, he sings about taking his partner away to the beach, near Marina del Rey. “It’s like a super dead beach, it’s deserted,” he says with a laugh. Gonzalez adds, “So it’s about ‘Let’s go to our little place that we know makes us feel better and have a sweet day together.’”

There’s a slow hypnotism of “Dark Vacay” that’s already made it one of the most popular songs on the album along with “Tejano Blue” (that’s the more explicit one) but “Baby Blue Movie” is Cigarettes After Sex’s most upbeat song to date. Gonzalez calls it “the weirdest song on the record.” It’s inspired by dark-pop songs like Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence” and “Missing” by Everything But The Girl, which Gonzalez calls “gentle club bangers.”

He makes it a point to mention here that he’s fully aware of how people say all their songs sound the same. It comes from the artist wanting to go back to “certain moves I like to do as a songwriter.” He adds,  “And it’s meant to sound the same, but it’s cool to stretch it a bit, like on ‘Tejano Blue’ and ‘Baby Blue Movie.’”  

Lyrically, there’s a memoir chapter narrated in “Baby Blue Movie,” but Gonzalez intended to keep things cryptic this time rather than straightforward. “I’ll have songs that are like a memoir, like I said, where it’s really based on exactly certain memories of somebody. Some are based on somebody, but it’s a little slanted, it’s a little blurrier. And then there are songs that are totally invented where a song like ‘Kiss It Off Me.’ I was more of a screenwriter on that song,” he adds.

Compared to previous material, Gonzalez says they took more production elements into account, digging into more grooves. “We played a static drum beat, like a drum loop, off a drum machine in a certain way, and played live on top of that. And then I moved things around a bit to make it groove the way I wanted to. Then the final step was having the drummer, Jacob Tomsky, come in and redo the drums. So that was a little more produced than we usually do,” he says.

With the album out now, a world tour beckons Cigarettes After Sex to promote X’s all through 2024 up to early 2025. Gonzalez is upfront about how the setlist will change. “I’ve always kind of hated when bands played a lot of their new record,” he says with a laugh. “You should barely any new stuff. I think we’ll have maybe four new songs at the very most and that feels like a lot, even to me,” Gonzalez adds.

Of course, if fans are clamoring for more new songs off X’s, Gonzalez is more than happy to play them. He adds about the setlist they’re preparing for the upcoming X’s tour, “I’m more like, let’s focus on the songs that people know. We’ll play a bit longer, for sure and we’re trying to make the show just feel even more cinematic, more dynamic, feel more like it’s this world that you walk into that has a really specific feeling to it, as if you walked into a movie or something, but it should also feel like a rock show.”

India has always been a part of Cigarettes After Sex’s history so far, right from when they made their debut at Bacardi NH7 Weekender festival in Pune in 2017 and indoor shows in Mumbai in 2019. Most recently, they were back to perform at the inaugural edition of Lollapalooza India in Mumbai in 2023. Gonzalez recalls their Lollapalooza India show, “It was just so beautiful, looking out over that crowd. I think it was sunset when we were playing and everything.”

There are plans for a return to India as well to promote X’s. “We’ve been trying to do a tour forever, since 2017,” Gonzalez adds. The universality of Cigarettes After Sex’s music is one that Gonzalez has seen reaching far, to places like India and it amazes him. He adds, “It just shows that we’re all united together. That’s what’s cool about this, that everyone can share those experiences together, you know?”