LOVE IN THE TIME OF ALGORITHMS

LOVE IN THE TIME OF ALGORITHMS

How Cigarettes After Sex continue to mine love and lust—but now they’ve hit the big time

Kim Taylor Bennett

“Who’s the slut of New York?” asks a disheveled man with a wonky grin, holding a cardboard sign that asks the same question in Sharpie.

I’m sitting with Greg Gonzalez, the singer of Cigarettes After Sex, on a bench in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, and before either of us has a chance to respond, he answers his own question.

“Definitely him, not her,” he says, gesturing to Gonzalez and then at me. Gonzalez chuckles goodnaturedly before the man launches into a just-kidding explanation: Apparently the real slut of New York is actually Brad Pitt because he has “a tiny microdick.” Well, that clears that up. Certainly a novel opener to segue into asking for spare change. Dollars forfeited, he slips back into the lunchtime melee to try his luck elsewhere.

“Never heard that before, and he mostly had me,” Gonzalez says. “Until that weird micro-dick thing. The other stuff—there’s some kind of poetry there.”

Just before we were interrupted, we were discussing how crazy it is that Cigarettes After Sex will play Madison Square Garden this fall. Gonzalez will be backlit or spotlit, monochrome visuals flickering, and the band will deliver their spacious, sensual pop-noir to 19,500 fans. His soothing, androgynous vocals will compete with a crowd echoing every word, as thousands of Greg Gonzalezes are captured and beamed back into the faces of the thousands with their screens held high. These videos will be pored over and posted, proof they were there, a declaration of kind. In-feed it might follow a TikTok ’fit check with friends. They’ll be decked out in black.

“The TikTok generation of fans enjoy shows differently—which is mostly singing very loud,” offers Gonzalez. “But you know you’re doing something right if you have a youthful audience. It means there’s a spirit to it.”

Since 2008, Gonzalez has self-produced one EP, three albums, and a handful of loosies, with Cigarettes After Sex riding two waves of viral success on two different platforms. First there’s “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” off their debut 2012 EP, /. A fan eventually uploaded it to YouTube, where it languished before inexplicably popping off at the end of 2015. Then came 2017’s eponymous LP, cementing Gonzalez’s singular vision. Wanna roll around in your emotions? Here’s your soundtrack. “If someone is romantic or heartbroken, and they need this feeling and they pick up a record by us, they can’t go wrong,” says Gonzalez.

After the release of their second album, Cry, there came the TikTok gold rush—their music’s featured on more than 6.4 billion clips—and this viral cachet, coupled with a solid fan base, has now translated into big business. But back in 2012, they walked on stage at Hollywood’s Hotel Cafe to greet an audience of 50. By the end, only one person remained.

“New York has always felt kind, and L.A. was cruel to us in that moment, so there’s a revenge to be taken in L.A.,” he says lightly, smiling beneath his mustache. This year the band will play to 35,000 across two sold-out nights at L.A.’s Forum.

A couple years ago Gonzalez bought his first house in the leafy enclave of Laurel Canyon—white walls, high ceilings, a 1970-something retreat, with a little theater for binge-watching movies. Sometimes he’ll eat at Pace, the cozy local Italian; occasionally he’ll pop into the Chateau Marmont. Last time he was there, so was Britney Spears, causing a kerfuffle that would later be reported on TMZ.

As we wandered across Second, en route to Tompkins, he reminisced about taking the Avenue up to East 66th, to the now-shuttered Beekman Theater where he worked when he first moved from El Paso in 2013. Lured by the legacy of artists for whom the city’s messy tumble of humanity provided the grit with which they made their best work, Gonzalez never made it to the you’re-anofficial-New-Yorker 10-year milestone. “No, I wish. I’m a poser!” he jokes wryly.

Last time we met was back in 2017, at the Library on Avenue A. “I was just there the other night,” says the self-described night owl. “I feel like I have to go there when I’m in town.”

It’s also the bar where he’d hang with an ex called Kristen, and snapshots of that relationship ground some of CAS’ most beloved songs, “Affection,” “K,” and “Sweet" (the latter is a favorite of director David Lynch).

Los Angeles is his home now, but you get the sense that New York still holds first place in his heart, and not just because he misses the 4 a.m. closing times, the seasons, and good halal food. NYC is that chaotic lover you can’t quite shake; you’re always drawn back for one more rendezvous.

Today, as he was when we met seven years ago, Gonzalez is in his standard all-black uniform: leather jacket, jeans, boots, Ray-Bans. It’s a warm day, but he’s the kind of guy—and there are many of them— who just doesn’t do shorts. “If I’m going swimming, yeah, sure,” he concedes. “I’m not going to swim in leather pants, really...even though in the song it says ‘swim in your leather.’”

He’s referencing “Tejano Blue,” off X’s, CAS’ breathlessly anticipated third LP, with a melody that telegraphs bright optimism, its chorus communicating the giddy recklessness falling for someone inspires. As the album’s first single it signifies a comparatively pacier groove, which largely sustains across the record—a slight but welcome shift from the swoony, soporific mode of previous offerings. A nod to his Tex-Mex roots and an understated ode to Selena’s oeuvre, it also introduces the album’s main muse, Gonzalez’s most recent ex-girlfriend. In “Tejano Blue” he was living in NYC, she in L.A., and they flew to Miami to reunite. The encounter is sexy and moving, and Gonzalez is nothing if not diaristically specific. “This sounds kind of silly, but she was the first girlfriend I really moved in with,” admits the 41-year-old. Their relationship lasted the better part of four years, and its effect was seismic.

There are traces of her on Cry, but on X’s the arc of their affair dominates the 10-song collection. When Gonzalez moved to Bunker Hill in downtown LA. at the end of 2019, all plans were soon curtailed by the pandemic. They went from long-distance to 24/7, and songs like the title track, “Hideaway,” and “Holding Me, Holding You" map these intense, tender times, undoubtedly heightened by the end-of-days uncertainty lurking outside their (everyone’s) door.

Having been unable to tour Cry, and after two and a half years off the road, the trio—completed by drummer Jacob Tomsky and bassist Randall Miller—began touring in June 2022, and Gonzalez’s girlfriend came too. It was an exciting time, but as chronicled in “Dark Vacay,” the pair began to falter, the buoyant chorus—“Feel the world around you"— juxtaposed by the savage economy of “In summer I’m living on pills and lines/With someone I love I don’t really like."

Gonzalez snags a fragment of a human in a moment and imbues the portrayal with emotions that are primal and potent.

“I felt so optimistic, that’s just my personality, and the situation felt so dire when it didn’t need to be," explains Gonzalez. “We were having such a bad time in these amazing surroundings, and there was so much beauty around us, so many great shows, so many new places—Cairo, Dubai, Rome, Athens.... We tried, and it all came crumbling down anyway."

“Ambien Slide” closes the album, and it’s one of CAS’ most devastating cuts. Gonzalez treads carefully: “I want to be personal in my writing, but I don’t want it to be too much at someone else’s expense. It’s really just unfaithfulness. You have to cope with it somehow, on both sides, and darkness can arise out of that."

El Paso is a border town framed by the Franklin Mountains rearing up to the north and the Rio Grande to the south. Mexico’s Juarez is a stone’s throw away, and Gonzalez’s parents would take him to the markets, which is where he found a bootleg of The Monkees’ Greatest Hits. They became his first favorite band. Back then, his mom managed a furniture store, and his dad was involved in VHS distribution. Every week he’d receive “demo tapes” of movies to watch, instructing the rental stores what to order—“Oh, you gotta get 10 copies of Jurassic Park,” or "Top Gun, it’s gonna be huge." This meant there were floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked like his own personal Blockbuster. “It made me a big hit with my friends.”

It was also where Gonzalez was first exposed to art-house films, the Three Colors trilogy, and Like Water for Chocolate, alongside erotic films like Emmanuelle...and Playboy’s Wet & Wild. Like any curious kid, he watched it all. Hardcore porn? Hard no. “It showed me what kind of sexuality I responded to, the atmosphere—gentle, soft, low lighting," he admits.

For Gonzalez, films have been just as formative as his love of the Doors, Metallica, or Cocteau Twins; Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane. And just as music fans use bands or songs as a shortcut to tap into a feeling, or build a bridge with another human, so cinephiles use films to create a similar connection.

The Wim Wenders classic Paris, Texas was a significant touchstone for X’s because it takes place in the Lone Star State, but also because Gonzalez and his ex loved it. He draws the parallel between some of his new songs and the film’s Super 8 montage depicting the joyful early-era love of the characters played by Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski. Gonzalez gets emotional discussing the film’s finale where, four years after Kinksi fled, Stanton is reunited with his estranged wife. She’s working at a peep show, so they’re separated by a one-way mirror, and with his back to her, Stanton recounts their story in the third person: how “just an ordinary trip down to the grocery store was full of adventure. They were always laughing at stupid things." His recollections are a sentimental gut punch, but he finishes the monologue by taking accountability for his fuckups, his claustrophobic jealousy, and his insecurity. In spite of their profound love, he understands they’re better off apart.

“Being in a relationship is like being in the middle of an ocean with somebody," says Gonzalez. “On this record, I'm reliving these moments that are gone, and it was a really beautiful love while it lasted."

Gonzalez’s reverence for cinema is all over the band’s Instagram: iconic scenes of Paul Newman in Hud, a Godard snippet, a shot of the late, great French chanteuse Francoise Hardy, who was a heroturned-friend. And then there’s The Virgins Suicides, Speed, Cruel Intentions—all filtered black and white, of course.

There are no official CAS music videos because Gonzalez feels he could never live up to the greats, and besides, now their fans make promos. Cigarettes After Sex hold five spots in the top 1 percent of TikTok’s viral audio creations, and boy, what range! A cat cuddling a phone, two lovers cheek to cheek, a downcast dude in a crowd of kissing couples. Their music accompanies GRWM videos, sunsets, and proposals; it adds extra gravitas to Lars and Dave Mustaine’s showdown in Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster. Oh, the pathos when Family Guy’s Stewie tucks himself into bed because now he’s sobbing to “Cry.”

There are too many clips to count that feature fans jokingly bemoaning CAS’ sonic glut of samesame-same, followed by a quick cut to that very fan sobbing along. The fact is, the band’s appeal lies in their immutability. It’s the ultimate vibes music. Gonzalez is a cipher onto whom listeners can project, and his lyrics circle the most obsessed-over aspects of the human condition: love’s serotonin hits, lust, yearning, and aching despair.

“At first it was ‘Apocalypse’ and K’ that came back with a vengeance,” says Gonzalez of the social network’s effect on his career. “Then ‘Cry’ became like stock music for TikTok: If you need some sad music, use the ‘Cry’ intro! It was unexpected because it wasn’t a single and no one said anything about it when it came out. I love being surprised."

While older music fans may whine for a time before streaming and algorithms (tough shit, R.I.P. our attention spans), there’s something cool about responding to someone’s art by creating something else entirely. Tale as old as time, but this medium is still new. And it’s an indisputably great thing that shoegaze originators—Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Ride—are now seeing more widespread (streaming) success thanks to people sharing their music on the platform. Meanwhile, the next gen of shoegaze/slowcore/dream pop artists continue to incubate and emerge. Although let’s lament the existence of Bubble Tea and Cigarettes. With songs like “SAM Empanada With You" and “He Asked Me to Quit Smoking,” they sound like a CAS spoof. Alas, this duo are dead serious.

Back on the East Village bench, for me certainly, and for Gonzalez too probably, these streets are memories and the ever-present threat of running into those memories. Sure, these memories are off living their lives, but these places still hold them, you still hold them, and the same could be said for the Cigarettes After Sex canon. Gonzalez snags a fragment of a human in a moment and imbues the portrayal with emotions that are primal and potent. The songs on X’s are as much about honoring experiences, before the passion dissipates, as they are about giving Gonzalez closure.

“I have to confront and process things this way in order to get over it,” he explains. “It’s about holding up a mirror to the relationship and ultimately yourself. So it’s honestly kind of selfish in that way too."

So what has he learned? “Just how much space I need to have my own world,” he admits. “There’s a danger where I’m spending too much time with somebody and the things that I want to do creatively can fall by the wayside. I need someone who understands that I recharge by being alone. It’s not meant to be 24/7. And I tried that, like John and Yoko, that’s very romantic to me, to spend every waking second together. But I think I’m best with someone who’s very independent too. It’s nothing personal, but if I’m writing all the time, I’m in such a good mood."

One of Gonzalez’s favorite films is The Red Shoes, an extravagant, Technicolor-rich 1948 interpretation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Heavy on symbolism and surrealism, the film tells the story of a ballerina’s professional ascent, but at what cost? Meanwhile, those red ballet slippers are the haunted and controlling physical manifestation of her ambition. It’s the age-old artist’s conflict: the tug of war between domestic contentment and the relentless pursuit of creative excellence. “She can’t be the greatest in the world and be in love at the same time, which is very sad,” he says. Feels accurate. “Yeah, it’s strange, but Kubrick was married forever. Maybe it’s person to person.”

As adored as CAS are, after their first album came #MeToo, and his lyrics have not been immune to reframing and analysis. Some online discourse bristles at the perceived “softcore misogyny” and the male gaze under which women in his songs are rendered one-dimensional figures who always acquiesce.

As an aside: One God-abiding music fan turned to Reddit to ask if CAS were a “Catholic-safe band since it includes the name ‘sex’ in the title. I like their music but if it is bad I will stop listening to it.”

“Just judging by the name alone it’s bad,” came one response.

And yeah, I’m not sure Jesus would be thrilled with songs that mention hentai or Brazzers, or “Young and Dumb,” where he croons: “I know full well that you are/The patron saint of sucking cock/Senorita, you’re a cheater/Well, so am I.”

Gonzalez constantly navigates eroticism, love, and surrender, and it’s a path from which he’s never strayed. In fact, he set out his stall on “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby”: “Whispered something in your ear/It was a perverted thing to say/But I said it anyway/Made you smile and look away.”

“I take this criticism seriously, and I would never dismiss an argument,” says Gonzalez. “If I can’t defend what’s been criticized, then that’s on me—it’s up to me to make someone understand what I’m talking about. Since it’s coming from such a deep, personal place, I feel like it’s a powerful thing to express, and that’s why I’m comfortable with it.”

He adds: “Dirty words that are said affectionately, it’s essentially still a dirty thing, but it’s from a sweet point of view, a place of passion. I’m talking about relationships where we were very much in love. It’s not, here’s my diary of hookups. That’s a huge distinction too: It’s coming from a place of love, always.”

He seeks to enshrine these exchanges, and as with anyone’s relationship, when you’re on the outside looking in, there’s a language, humor, and playfulness that simply won’t translate to everyone. Is pop music about

a balanced viewpoint? Are the hooks you wanna holler the ones that carefully consider and deliver all sides?

On “Sweet” he declares, “I will gladly break my heart for you." And in truth, the tectonic plates of power in relationships are always shifting. If you want your pop puritanical, Google can help you out with some suggestions.

In the midst of creating X’s, Gonzalez released the lush, filmic Charm of Pleasure EP with Daniele Luppi, an Italian composer specializing in spectacular string arrangements and who’s collaborated with Danger Mouse, Karen O, and Parquet Courts. Working under his own name, Gonzalez found his writing more impressionistic, straying from his selfimposed CAS constraints.

Naturally this stirs considerations of additional extracurriculars. When you’re the singer in a successful band, a solo record is “kinda what you’re supposed to do,” but to Gonzalez, CAS’ output feels like a solo project, so what’s the point? Nevertheless, he sees CAS as finite. “If I didn’t feel like writing about love, I would close the door on Cigarettes,” he says, fingers arched, not touching, rubbing his palms slowly together, as he often does when formulating a response. “And I actually want the door to close at some point. We wouldn’t play live either, we’d just cut it off, that would be ideal. There’s something powerful about that.”

That time, however, doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. Gonzalez is open and laid-back, but he checks those streaming numbers, and those numbers are impressive. On Spotify alone they have 24 million monthly listeners, which puts them in Spotify’s 240 top-streamed artists. That’s more than Charli XCX or horde, more than Foo Fighters or the 1975. His ambitions for Cigarettes After Sex are stadium-size—literally—thanks in part to a tape he had as a kid of Queen at Wembley Stadium.

“That’s when you know you’re a force to be reckoned with,” he says. “I didn’t want to be just an indie band. I respect that, but I was more influenced by artists that became household names. I always wanted to have No. 1 records, but with us, it feels like the slowest play in the world. It’ll take years. I’m really patient, though, it’s fine, I'll wait,” he says, not entirely unseriously.

Cigarettes After Sex are wildly popular, yet they still feel cultish, because to me, their music sounds like the antithesis of mainstream pop. But Gonzalez proposes that beyond the universality of subject, his music adheres to traditional pop forms, and this is also intrinsic to their appeal.

“Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge—that structure is really important to tell a story,” he says. “The music that’s most emotional for me is just very simple. There’s a reason why it works.”

By this point we’ve left the park, weaving back toward Bowery, discussing legacy and resonance, punctuated only briefly when someone offers to sell us some drugs. “The writing is the most important part, and it should stand the test,” he says. “The record is my interpretation of the song, but the song should be better than the record." Essentially, Gonzalez would like his songs to become standards that “live on and have different lifetimes."

“That’s what I want for Cigarettes, where it’s an influence that’s known, that’s really precious to people,” he says. “Music is definitely my whole life, and when you’re young, an artist can mean everything to you for a little while, but then also as you grow old, there will always be echoes. And I want to be that for somebody else.”