Cigarettes After Sex

Cigarettes After Sex Announces Bangkok Stop on World Tour in 2025!

Live Nation Tero Presale on 30 July via Livenationtero.co.th 

Photo Cred: Ebru Yildiz

 

PURCHASE & SHARE: X's LP

Pre-Order

 

LISTEN & SHARE: Cigarettes After Sex - "Dark Vacay"

Stream

 

LISTEN & SHARE: Cigarettes After Sex - "Tejano Blue"

Stream

 

 

Cigarettes After Sex announced their new LP, titled X's (due 7/12), alongside their upcoming world tour, which fea-tures shows at some of the globe's most iconic venues, like Madison Square Garden and London's O2 Arena, with Bangkok stop on January 21st, 2025 at Impact Exhibition Hall 5.

 

Tickets for ‘Cigarettes After Sex in Bangkok’ go on sale starting Live Nation Tero presale on July 30th (10am – 10pm local time) via livenationtero.co.th. General sale starts on July 31st at 10am onwards via thaiticketmajor.com

 

The band shares the second cut from their forthcoming album, entitled "Dark Vacay." Filled with raw, imagistic, some-times smutty vignettes set to entrancing, slow-burn pop songs, bandleader Greg Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. The track conflates hedonistic European tour memories - running around Prague, giddy and punch drunk - with his more recent experiences unraveling in close quarters on the road with an ex-love. He goes on to explain, “This song is about a romance I had a few years ago. We went on tour together & were lucky enough to go to all these wonderful places, mostly having fun at first.  As the tour continued though, everything started falling apart & we ended up breaking up by the end of it. I was left wishing that we were somehow able to see all of the beauty around us before it was too late..."

Since the release of “Tejano Blue,” with the announcement of X’s and the corresponding global arena tour, Cigarettes After Sex have racked up 20M plays on the single, which was featured on 43 Spotify New Music Friday playlists, alongside a digital billboard in Times Square. They are currently the #250 most-streamed artist in the world on the platform, with over 25M monthly listeners. The tour – which includes venues like Madison Square Garden, The Forum, the o2 Arena and more – is off to a tremendous start with sellouts in London, Warsaw, Sydney, Athens, Brussels, Lyon, Cape Town and more. Over 400K tickets have been sold internationally thus far and demand saw them adding extra shows in LA, London, Athens, Melbourne, and Sydney. The news spread quickly, with writeups in Stereogum, Conse-quence, Brooklyn Vegan, Pollstar, the NY Post and more. Enthusiasm for the track has led to early radio adds across the country at multiple formats, and a quick debut on the Alternative Top 40. All of this activity comes amid a flurry of growth on social media, with the band eclipsing the 4M follower mark on Instagram, and hitting half a Million on TikTok with only three posts on the platform. Not content to let new music have all the shine, the band’s self-titled record just enjoyed a new chart peak on the Billboard 200 in its 50th week on the chart.

With X’s, Cigarettes After Sex finally takes center stage as not just one of today’s preeminent indie bands, but as one of the most globally accomplished acts across any genre, whose often unconventional path to superstardom has helped reshape the very definition of success for artists in the modern era. 

"Dark Vacay" is available today via All DSPs, and Cigarettes After Sex's new LP, X's, is out July 12th via Partisan Records.

 

X's Biography

 

Ten years ago Greg Gonzalez was having a really rough Valentine’s Day. Freshly heartbroken with no hope of reconcil-iation, 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 cap-tures 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.

 

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.

 

Photo Cred: Ebru Yildiz

 

The proof is in the numbers: As of Feb 2024, their 23 million monthly Spotify listeners sits them squarely in the plat-form’s top 250 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 even 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 Holly-wood 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 inti-mate 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 touch-stones 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 vo-cals, 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.

 

“I have to confront everything I went through, that's just how I make peace,” confirms Gonzalez. “These are like photo-graphs, 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.”

 

X's - TRACKLISTING

 

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

 

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX LINKS

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music | TikTok