The record’s lead single “Tejano Blue” is out now
Today, Cigarettes After Sex announce their new LP, titled X’s (due 7/12), alongside their upcoming world tour, which features shows at some of the globe’s most iconic venues, like Madison Square Garden and London’s O2, with more Asia, South America and Middle East shows to be announced at a later date.
Filled with raw, imagistic, sometimes smutty vignettes set to entrancing, slowburn pop songs, bandleader Greg Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. But where previous albums have drawn from an amalgam of relationships, for the most part, X’s centralizes on just one relationship that spanned four years.
“The record feels brutal,” admits Gonzalez. “I could sit and talk about this loss to someone, but that wouldn’t scratch the surface. I have to really write about it, sing about it, have the music, and then I can start to analyze and learn from it. Or just relive it—in a good way. I don’t have that Eternal Sunshine-thing of wanting to forget.”
While continuing to observe classic pop song structures, Gonzalez has moved away from the prior sonic touchstones of the ‘50s and ‘60s, finding himself now drawn to a ‘70s/’80s slow dance. While (in typical Cigarettes style) these changes may be subtle, the overall resulting energy is akin to disco ball-refracted tears on the dance floor.
Today also marks the release of the record’s first single, “Tejano Blue”, a nod to the music of bandleader Greg Gonzalez’s Texas childhood, resulting in the most instantly memorable version (and liveliest tempo) yet of the band’s signature sensual, timeless, love songs.
Gonzalez explains: “I grew up in El Paso & Tejano music is huge there. You could go to a lot of the bars in the city & hear artists like Selena, Los Ángeles Azules & La Mafia playing over the speakers. It was in the atmosphere around me back then, but I always rejected it & gravitated towards anything else I was attracted to really.
“Years later when I was living in New York City I finally started listening to Selena’s ‘Como La Flor’ at the same time that I was also listening to a lot of Cocteau Twins. I had the idea then to try to combine both of their sounds somehow, which felt a bit strange, but also felt like it was coming from a genuine place of rediscovering & finally connecting with the music that I heard around me in my youth.”
“Tejano Blue” is available today via All DSPs, and Cigarettes After Sex’s new LP, X’s, is out July 12th via Partisan Records.
You can see the band live on their world tour starting this Fall. Tickets will be available starting with an artist presale beginning Tuesday, March 5 at 10am local time for North American dates only. Additional presales will run throughout the week ahead of the general onsale beginning Friday, March 8 at 10am local time at cigarettesaftersex.com.
Cigarettes After Sex wants to give fans, not scalpers, the best chance to buy tickets at face value. To make this possible they have chosen to use Ticketmaster’s Face Value Exchange. If fans purchase tickets for a show and can’t attend, they’ll have the option to resell them to other fans at the original price paid. To help protect the Exchange, Cigarettes After Sex have requested all tickets be mobile only and restricted from transfer. This applies to all shows except those in CO, UT, IL and NY where Face Value Exchange cannot be mandated. Please note, a valid bank account or debit card within the country of your event is required to sell on the Face Value Exchange.
Ten years ago Greg Gonzalez was having a really rough Valentine’s Day. Freshly heartbroken with no hope of reconciliation, he spent two hours driving from his hometown El Paso to play a show, and he listened to Sade’s “By Your Side” on repeat both ways. “The experience that day stuck in my bones—it was an idea that I couldn’t forget,” says Gonzalez, the frontman of Cigarettes After Sex. “I thought, how do I make a record that feels like that?”
With each record—the initial 2012 EP, 2017’s eponymous debut album, and 2019’s Cry— Gonzalez has been faithful to his muse: love. In raw, imagistic, sometimes smutty vignettes set to entrancing, slowburn pop songs, Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. But where previous albums have drawn from an amalgam of relationships, for the most part, their third, eagerly anticipated LP, X’s, centralizes on just one relationship that spanned four years.
“The record feels brutal, honestly,” admits Gonzalez. “I could sit and talk about this loss to someone, but that wouldn’t scratch the surface. I have to really write about it, sing about it, have the music, and then I can start to analyze and learn from it. Or just relive it—in a good way. I don’t have that Eternal Sunshine-thing of wanting to forget.”
For Gonzalez, preservation, catharsis, and deep self-reflection are absolutely essential to his process and his art. “It was such an intense experience and really beautiful while it lasted,” explains Gonzalez. “It’s about romance, but it’s also about who I was in that moment. How did I navigate these situations? What did I do? That’s the painful thing: you’re seeing yourself back then.”
This period was one of immense personal growth for Gonzalez, but it was also during these years that Cigarettes After Sex would hit staggering new levels in their career. The build has certainly been cumulative, beginning slowly with the virality around their earliest music and accelerated by a ceaseless tour ethic that has carried them all over the world, from Chile to Egypt to Indonesia and everywhere in between.
But something else happened in the worldwide pandemic pause. Cry came out at the tail-end of 2019 and wasn’t really toured until two years later, and in that gulf of time the band found themselves thrust into becoming more than simply a preeminent indie act, but as one of the most globally accomplished acts across any genre, ready to take center stage as superstars.
The proof is in the numbers: As of Feb 2024, their 23 million monthly Spotify listenerssits them squarely in the platform’s top 240 most-streamed artists. Their music has been used 6.4 billion times (and counting) on TikTok, holding five spots in the top 1% of all viral audio creations. In 2023 they sold over 200k tickets globally (without being in an album cycle).
This ongoing rise is made all the more remarkable when you consider the band remain shadowy figures, there are no CAS music videos and their artwork is forever in moody monochrome. But in the era of the cult of personality, perhaps it’s this ongoing adherence to aesthetic, the rejection of overexposure in favor of a little mystique,that’s created the space for fans to truly commune with their music, sharing it like an illicit secret.
And so we have X’s, another lean collection which, like previous Cigarettes After Sex records, is also characterized by the place these songs were recorded. There’s the El Paso college stairwell for the first EP, the Brooklyn rehearsal space for the first album, the courtyard in a house in Mallorca, Spain for Cry, and now the home at the foot of the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, where Gonzalez lived with his then-partner. While initial demos were captured live in August 2020, with longstanding bandmates Jacob Tomsky (drums) and Randall Miller (bass), the lion-share was recorded in a small bedroom, over the course of six live sessions from 2021 to 2022. With the addition of Jeff Kite on keys, the intimate spirit was the antithesis of a big studio vibe: the mood was relaxed and open and afterwards they’d hang out, listen to music, and drink wine.
While continuing to observe classic pop song structures, Gonzalez has moved away from the prior sonic touchstones of the 50s and 60s, finding himself now drawn to a 70s/80s slow dance. But in typical Cigarettes style, these influences are subtle—in the drums regimented to a click, in the beat and bop of “Baby Blue Movie,” and in the overall energy akin to disco ball-refracted tears on the dance floor.
And then there’s Gonzalez’s constant throughline: his deft use of reverb and space, and his soothing, androgynous vocals, which he laid down in the Spring/Summer of 2023, when the singer was still deep in his grief. Instead of waiting for the healing balm of perspective, Gonzalez pressed on the bruise and harnessed the hurt.
What began as a long distance love, wound up in a move from New York to downtown Los Angeles just before the pandemic hit. Two nesting in the surprising sweetness of isolation, watching a livestream of the ocean while helicopters whirred outside in the apocalyptic air. From the emotional rubble at the relationship’s end, Gonzalez looks back at that time nostalgically in “Dreams From Bunker Hill.” He captures the relationship’s insatiable early days in “Hideaway,” and in the dancey sway of “Holding You, Holding Me.” And then there’s the tender “Tejano Blue.” While the lyrics depict the delicious possibility of forever, the title and rhythm is a hat-tip to Gonzalez’s Texas roots surrounded by Tejano music. Back then he was listening to Portishead, Cocteau Twins, Ennio Morricone, and Leonard Cohen, but this song offers his retrospective appreciation of a genre that was formative, if not easily traceable.
On opening title track “X’s” Gonzalez unspools a story of joyful exploration and endless days between the sheets—a lyric mirrored by the reference to Bert Stern’s now-iconic photoshoot with Marilyn Monroe, taken six weeks before she passed. Stern’s 2500 photos captured the actress vulnerable, playful, nude, and often in bed; the contact sheets augmented with savage X’s Monroe herself inked on the images she disliked. While the track and album title take inspiration from these instinctive scrawls, musically the tune’s plush-yet-spare blueprint recalls the now-classic “Sweet”—a song director David Lynch said made him feel hopeful for the future.
Elsewhere “Dark Vacay” conflates hedonistic European tour memories—running round Prague, giddy and punch drunk—with more recent experiences unraveling in close quarters on the road with Gonzalez’s then-girlfriend. “I wish I could’ve gotten out of this really claustrophobic mentality, and been grateful for everything that was happening…” reflects Gonzalez. “It’s just the end of a romance and trying very hard to see the beauty of it.”
The poignant ten song collection comes to an apt close with “Ambien Slide” which sees Gonzalez tackle the pain of dissolution neither partner can soothe or absolve. With the Super 8, domestic bliss sweetness of Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski’s characters in Paris, Texas, or the frank clarity of a Richard Brautigan poem, X’spreserves moments in amber—the sensuality, the surrender, the abyss, and the ache when it’s all over. Gonzalez is here for it.
“I have to confront everything I went through, that’s just how I make peace,” confirms Gonzalez. “These are like photographs, and if I write a song then it’ll always be dear to me, and yes, it’s painful that it’s gone, but I’m just so fucking lucky I had that ever.”
15 JUN 2024 / US / Manchester, TN / Bonnaroo
31 AUG 2024 / CA / Montreal, QC / Centre Bell
01 SEP 2024 / CA / Toronto, ON / Scotiabank Arena
03 SEP 2024 / US / Philadelphia, PA / Wells Fargo Center
04 SEP 2024 / US / Boston, MA / TD Garden
06 SEP 2024 / US / New York, NY / Madison Square Garden
10 SEP 2024 / US / Columbia, MD / Merriweather Post Pavilion
11 SEP 2024 / US / Raleigh, NC / PNC Arena
13 SEP 2024 / US / Orlando, FL / Kia Center
14 SEP 2024 / US / Atlanta, GA / State Farm Arena
17 SEP 2024 / US / San Antonio, TX / Frost Bank Center
18 SEP 2024 / US / Houston, TX / Toyota Center
20 SEP 2024 / US / Austin, TX / Moody Center
21 SEP 2024 / US / Fort Worth, TX / Dickies Arena
23 SEP 2024 / US / Chicago, IL / United Center
24 SEP 2024 / US / Saint Paul, MN / Xcel Energy Center
27 SEP 2024 / CA / Vancouver, BC / Rogers Arena
28 SEP 2024 / US / Seattle, WA / Climate Pledge Arena
30 SEP 2024 / US / Portland, OR / Moda Center
02 OCT 2024 / US / Greenwood Village, CO / Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre
03 OCT 2024 / US / Salt Lake City, UT / Delta Center
05 OCT 2024 / US / Oakland, CA / Oakland Arena
07 OCT 2024 / US / San Diego, CA / Viejas Arena
08 OCT 2024 / US / Phoenix, AZ / Desert Diamond Arena
11 OCT 2024 / US / Los Angeles, CA / Kia Forum
15 OCT 2024 / MX / Mexico City / Palacio de los Deportes
25 OCT 2024 / GR / Athens / OAKA Indoor Arena
28 OCT 2024 / NL / Amsterdam / Ziggo Dome
29 OCT 2024 / BE / Brussels / Forest National
01 NOV 2024 / IT / Milan / Forum
03 NOV 2024 / AT / Vienna / Wiener Stadthalle
05 NOV 2024 / PL / Warsaw / COS Torwar
07 NOV 2024 / DE / Berlin / Uber Arena
09 NOV 2024 / CH / Basel / St Jakobshalle
10 NOV 2024 / DE / Cologne / Lanxess Arena
12 NOV 2024 / UK / London / The O2
16 NOV 2024 / FR / Paris / Accor Arena
17 NOV 2024 / FR / Lyon / Halle Tony Garnier
20 NOV 2024 / ES / Madrid / WiZink Center
21 NOV 2024 / PT / Lisbon / Altice Arena
9 JAN 2025 / HK / Hong Kong / Asia World-Expo, Hall 5
11 JAN 2025 / MY / Kuala Lumpur / Sunway Lagoon
14 JAN 2025 / PH / Manila / MOA Arena
17 JAN 2025 / ID / Jakarta / Beach City International
21 JAN 2025 / TH / Bangkok / Impact Exhibition Hall 5
5 MAR 2025 / ZA / Cape Town / Grand Arena at GrandWest
7 MAR 2025 / ZA / Pretoria / SunBet Arena
12 MAR 2025 / AU / Melbourne / Rod Laver Arena
14 MAR 2025 / AU / Sydney / ICC Theatre
17 MAR 2025 / AU / Brisbane / Brisbane Entertainment Centre
19 MAR 2025 / NZ / Auckland / Spark Arena
1. X’s
2. Tejano Blue
3. Silver Sable
4. Hideaway
5. Holding you, Holding me
6. Dark Vacay
7. Baby Blue Movie
8. Hot
9. Dreams From Bunker Hill
10. Ambien Slide