Greg Gonzalez on the band’s new album Cry, their X-rated lyrics and why they’ve never made a music video
Greg Gonzalez writes songs like intimate diary entries: explicit, erotic and nakedly autobiographical. That was all well and good when he started out in 2008, before anyone was really listening, but in 2016, his band Cigarettes After Sex became an overnight internet sensation eight years in the making.
It was in January of that year that his song “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby”, which had been released to little fanfare four years earlier, went belatedly and unexpectedly viral.
It has now been played 95 million times on YouTube alone, helping the band’s 2017 self-titled debut album find an audience eager for its gauzy, hypnagogic melancholy and X-rated lyrics. The question is, does this success mean that now every potential romantic partner expects to be memorialised in song?
Frankly, I tell Gonzalez when we meet in the Mayfair Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, I’d be a little offended if I hooked up with him and he failed to christen me with a moniker as pornographically succinct as: “the patron saint of sucking c**k”.
Gonzalez, dressed in black jeans and a black leather jacket in what seems like a deliberate affront to the Californian heat outside, laughs and peers at me over the top of his black Ray-Bans. “Yeah, I feel like I hear that question a lot,” he says. “They’ll say: ‘So, what’s our song gonna be?’ It almost kills the magic if someone asks that. I go: ‘Well, it’s probably never going to happen now…’”
‘The music had to catch up with the band’s name – it was based off a moment where I was, you know… having what the name says. The more I thought about it, the more the sound of the songs started to match it’
It all started with that name. While still a fledgling musician in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez made the decision to call his band Cigarettes After Sex well before he knew what they would sound like. It set him unwaveringly on a path towards confessional songwriting.
“I think the music had to catch up with the name, almost,” he says. “The name was based off a moment where I was, you know… having what the name says. It was autobiographical, like a lot of the songs. I found that the more I thought about the name, the more the sound of the songs started to match it. The music became this kind of soothing comedown, but also a kind of euphoria.”
The sound Gonzalez arrived at for Cigarettes After Sex is slow and ethereal, with sparse, minimal arrangements caressing his androgynous vocal. Musically, it is indebted to the likes of Mazzy Star, Cowboy Junkies and Beach House, while lyrically there are nods to Leonard Cohen and the poetry of Richard Brautigan.
“I took a lot from Brautigan,” he says. “He was able to talk about sexuality in a very sweet way and also be very funny about it. Leonard Cohen was great at that, too. The storytelling that he achieves on ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ and ‘Chelsea Hotel’ is what I aspire to as a writer. All the details in there are great and there are so many knockout lines. Also, he was kind of dirty on ‘Chelsea Hotel’ and in some of his other stuff as well.”
After those early years spent experimenting with different styles – including a New Order phase and an electro-punk phase – Gonzalez finally nailed the Cigarettes After Sex sound in a secluded stairwell at his alma mater, the University of Texas. It was in that unlikely space that he and his bandmates recorded their first EP, I., including their eventual breakthrough hit.
A move to New York followed, where the band went on to record their full-length record in a tiny rehearsal space in Brooklyn in the middle of winter, surrounded by banks of snow. Both experiences gave Gonzalez a taste for atmospheric environments, so for the band’s new, second album, Cry, instead of a recording studio their label found them a secluded house on the island of Mallorca. “It’s like a work of art, the way it’s designed,” recalls Gonzalez. “The atmosphere was beautiful. We recorded every night under the stars, even in the middle of thunderstorms. It basically had everything we were looking for.”
Cry doesn’t tamper with the tried-and-tested Cigarettes After Sex formula too much: the instrumentation continues to be delicate, allowing the spotlight to fall on Gonzalez’s lyrics. Listen closely, however, and you might detect the sonic influence of two musicians who were very popular in El Paso in the 90s when Gonzalez was growing up.
“I think you gravitate towards the things that first opened you emotionally as a kid,” he says. “Those things ripple throughout your life. Once I got to New York I entered a period of being able to re-evaluate things from my childhood. I heard ‘You’re Still the One’ by Shania Twain and, even knowing how cheesy it was when it first came out, it’s still a gorgeous song to me. That influenced ‘Falling in Love’ on the new record, and the same thing happened with Selena’s ‘Como La Flor’, which influenced ‘Kiss it Off Me’. There are highbrow influences in Cigarettes, but there’s a lot of pop music, too.”
Their blend of quiet angst and pop hooks has made Cigarettes After Sex something of a gift for television dramas reaching for some added emotional heft. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” turned up on The Handmaid’s Tale, several Cigarettes After Sex songs soundtracked Killing Eve and an episode of Big Little Lies featured one of the band’s early B-sides, a cover of REO Speedwagon’s classic soft-rock power ballad “Keep on Loving You”.
Gonzalez is a cinema obsessive who namechecks Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura as his favourite film and worked at New York arthouse cinema The Beekman Theatre before the band took off, so naturally he is flattered by the attention. It seems strange, then, that a band who in part owe their success to YouTube have never made a music video themselves.
“That’s a weird one,” agrees Gonzalez. “Honestly, it just came from not liking anything we tried. I have some ideas, but I’m being contrarian about it. I’d like to make a short film and then soundtrack it, rather than making a song and then getting someone to direct the video. I’d want to do it backwards: create a bunch of interesting images and then write a song on top of that.”
The next thing on Gonzalez’s agenda is to take his latest collection of shared intimacies on the road, on a tour that arrives in the UK at the end of November. After that, he will return to Los Angeles, where he has just moved from his beloved New York City. Maybe then he will have time to embrace his cinematic urges. The Hollywood muse is calling and, with a bit of luck, she won’t put him off by asking him to write a song about her.
‘Cry’ is released on 25 October
