Greg Gonzalez walks into the Chateau Marmont dressed in his customary black, from his Ray-Bans down to his Tecovas boots. With his graying beard and rolled-up shirtsleeves, he could pass for a creative director at a digital marketing agency or an indie-film veteran now ready to convince you about the artistic risks that are still possible on streaming services. His presence does not create an electric ripple of recognition across the room, but for Gonzalez this relative anonymity is by design.
Gonzalez is actually the founder, singer, guitarist, songwriter, producer, and aesthetic guide of the band Cigarettes After Sex, whose songs have been streamed billions and billions of times. Later this year, they will headline an arena tour across the United States and Europe, including two sold-out shows at the Kia Forum in Inglewood and a pair of dates at the O2 in London. In early 2025, they’ll travel to Australia, South Africa, and Asia. One of the stops is Beach City International Stadium in Jakarta, Indonesia, a city where they presently have almost 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify—more than twice as many as they do in LA.
For almost a decade, the group—which also includes bassist Randall Miller and drummer Jacob Tomsky—has bewitched listeners with songs about love, lust, and longing. The tempos are slow and dreamy, like an ether haze, and the lyrics are direct, intimate, and occasionally lewd. After a five-year gap since their previous album, last week they released their third full-length, X’s.
On this hot summer day, Gonzalez takes a seat in the corner of the Marmont’s lobby and orders a mint tea, which he sweetens with honey. In person, his voice is deep and considered, not like his songs’ high, breathy vocals, which are inspired by the female singers that he loves, like Sade, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Julee Cruise, and the recently departed French singer Françoise Hardy. “When I first heard that record, La question, which is still my favorite album of all time, it was like, oh, that's exactly the feeling that I want,” he says. “That's exactly the voice that I'd like to have. It just felt like pure beauty.”
He lives nearby, in Laurel Canyon. It’s his third home in four years of being in LA, but he feels like he’s only recently started to figure out the city—where he wants to be a regular, who his friends are, how to navigate it. “Anywhere I go, I just feel like such an outsider,” he says. “It just feels like I'm never really supposed to be part of a scene or something, and that's how Cigarettes feels, too.”
Gonzalez is 41 years old and was born in El Paso, Texas. At the end of the 2000s he was entering his late twenties and came up with the idea for Cigarettes After Sex. Well, a version of Cigarettes After Sex. At the time he was making money around his hometown by playing bass in jazz and Top 40 cover bands, or doing solo acoustic guitar gigs where he’d sing Ricky Nelson and Everly Brothers songs.
The initial concept for Cigarettes After Sex was to create songs with honest lyrics, like Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” or “Chelsea Hotel #2.” but with music inspired by new wave and synth pop acts like Erasure, New Order, and early Madonna. Gonzalez’s words had more of a bitter edge back then, so he phased out the confessional part and tried to be more poetic. The music got darker and more reverb-y, like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Then in 2012, he had a particularly rough year—a close friend died, he was going through a breakup—and he fell under the spell of the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session album, the one with their cover of “Sweet Jane” on it. Gonzalez heard that the Canadian alt-country band only used one microphone on Trinity, so he decided to strip everything away in Cigarettes After Sex. He returned to the confessional lyrics, his bitterness exorcized, and took an anti-production approach to the sound, trying to harken back to the days of Buddy Holly or Sun Records.
Gonzalez recorded I., a four-song EP, in a stairwell at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he’d once been a student, aiming to make something that sounded, as he puts it, like “‘It's My Party’ by Lesley Gore, but on painkillers.” He soon moved to New York City, chasing visions of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and Martin Scorsese. Years passed; he played bass in a funk band, worked in a movie theater on the Upper East Side, and performed sparsely attended Cigarettes After Sex shows. Gonzalez thought that if his group was ever going to get any traction, it’d be because someone in the music press would discover and champion them, as he’d seen with other Brooklyn bands. That didn’t happen.
By 2015, he was in debt and his bandmates had left the city before they had finished an album. The group released a new single called “Affection” to not much attention. Then one day, out of nowhere, he started getting notifications that people were listening to Cigarettes After Sex on YouTube. Constantly. A fan had uploaded the group’s music to the platform and it was now going viral. Once Cigarettes After Sex created their own official account, the subscriber numbers reached into the millions. “I remember being in my bed just sobbing,” Gonzalez says. “I was just like, ‘Wow, something finally happened.’ It was like a storm. And that was just so intense.”
They soon booked a European tour and signed to the indie Partisan Records. The label realized the group’s success was bigger than a data story and there was not only an engaged fanbase, but that it had the capacity to grow. “We were really trying to understand what Greg’s vision was, and he felt that they could be a big cult band,” says Zena White, now Partisan’s Chief Operating Officer. “So our North Star was to work towards them being the biggest cult band in the world.”
Because Cigarettes After Sex still employs guitar, bass, and drums, it can be hard to divorce them from the 20th century metrics of rock & roll success, but in 2024, they largely don’t apply. The only RIAA certifications they can claim are two platinum singles—“K.” and “Apocalypse” from their self-titled debut. They’ve never had a radio hit, because their songs tend to spike in popularity on TikTok or other social media platforms at unpredictable times, often years after they were released. They’ve never had an iconic music video, because they don’t make any videos. Taking a page from the Smiths and Belle & Sebastian, they never appear in their moody, always black-and-white album art, so they rarely get approached in public. They do tour prodigiously and journey to far-off locations, but when they perform, it’s in near darkness.
Lizzy Szabo, who oversees many Spotify playlists as the digital streaming platform’s lead indie editor, notes that 75% of Cigarettes After Sex’s listeners on the service are Gen Z or younger. “If you're in that early to mid-20s age, you're starting out your independent adult life, you're falling in love, and you're romanticizing the things that you're doing,” she says. “It totally makes sense why this is popular.”
Many listeners come to Spotify and engage in mood listening—searching for music based on emotion or situation, not artist or genre. Cigarettes After Sex songs have become mainstays on curated playlists like Sad Indie and generative ones like Make Out Jams. They also blend right in on popular, nebulous playlists like My Life is a Movie and Levitate. "It’s introspective music,” Szabo says. “You can really apply it to your life or just fall into it or forget it's even playing and just allow it to soundtrack what you're doing.” The group has been called “ambient pop,” nodding to the unobtrusive genre that Brian Eno pioneered, but “ambiance pop” might be a more apt description.
Gonzalez’s lyrics aren’t filled with hidden meaning. The feelings are clear and declarative, as if he is composing a letter to its subject. In fact, he’ll often show song lyrics to the person it’s about before he records it. “I've always had this shyness where it's hard to articulate how you feel to somebody,” he says. “You can do it, but it's better to do it in a song and really just paint the picture of exactly what you felt for that person. It's therapeutic for me, for sure.”
This straightforwardness also helps Cigarettes After Sex transcend potential language barriers, which may be why their international audience has remained so large. “They're really honest songs about love and love is a universal feeling,” says White. “The honesty of it just makes people feel seen. Probably in very Western cultures it's not radical, but in some cultures, it is radical to be talking about love in this way. And people get drawn to that because art makes you feel understood in that sense.”
Just how Leonard Cohen once sang of “getting head on an unmade bed,” Gonzalez also peppers his song with explicit references to sexuality, including calling a lover “the patron saint of sucking cock” or saying another never needs to tell him when she cums because he always feels it. He says those moments are meant to be playful, not pervy or leering. “l liked the idea that in relationships you can say these things that are dirty, but they’re sweet,” he says. “That just felt honest to me.” He also acknowledges that it’s often those lines that the crowd sings the loudest at concerts.
Cigarette After Sex’s new album X’s is largely about a recent relationship of Gonzalez’s that has since ended. He was living with a girlfriend for the first time in his life, new to Los Angeles and at the start of the COVID pandemic, a situation he describes as “hardcore advanced difficult.” On “Hideaway” he wistfully describes a day together drinking wine on unpopular beaches, and on “Dreams From Bunker Hill” he details a couple deciding whether to stay together forever as they feel themselves pulling farther apart from each other.
Gonzalez tried to update the production on X’s a bit, nudging it a few decades forward in its references, but still landing in the 20th century. He was drawn to the dark romanticism of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, as well as the adult contemporary pop of the late 1980s and early ’90s—deeply uncool but undeniable ballads like Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” and Paula Abdul’s “Rush Rush.” These were some of the first songs he loved, watching their music videos on VH1 before he dismissed them as cheesy in his teenage years and embraced metal bands, moody English groups, and the experimental sounds of John Zorn.
On the woozy standout “Silver Sable,” Gonzalez references listening to these soft hits in the darkness of his bedroom, recalling a childhood memory and a page from the Marvel Swimsuit Special, but he then transposes a modern-day girlfriend into the scene with him. “There was some kind of weird dreaminess to that,” he says. It now exists in a space fittingly outside of time, ready to be found by unborn generations as they enter “horny” or “depressed” or “nostalgic” into the search bars of the future.