Cigarettes After Sex frontman Greg Gonzalez had a clear vision for his band’s debut album, a gorgeously cinematic work released via Partisan Records last year.

 

 

After the phenomenal online break-out success of ‘Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby’ and the subsequent rediscovery of an earlier Cigarettes EP (‘I.’) from 2012, the Brooklyn transplant (originally from El Paso) wanted to project his worldview on to a bigger screen, a broader canvas. This November, the band will come back to China with two new singles ‘Crush’ and ‘Sesame Syrup’, both consistent with their musical aesthetics and depicting romantic but saccharine love stories.

That sense of fulfillment is richly felt on Cigarettes After Sex, which unspools like the most achingly romantic of movies: immersive, cohesive and transporting. Swooning in the spirit of influences such as Mazzy Star and Red House Painters, its sumptuous songs of love elevate Cigarettes to the ranks of those acts who create worlds of their own, exciting the most devoted kind of following – for Gonzalez, The Smiths were a reference point.

 

Right from the off, Gonzalez’s ability to set a scene and sustain a mood reels you in deeply. On album opener ‘K.’, a tale of blossoming love etched in tiny details luxuriates over chiming guitars; on the hymn to the romantic compulsion of ‘Each Time You Fall in Love’, the suspended animation of Angelo Badalamenti’s heart-stopping Twin Peaks music is echoed. ‘Sunsetz’ and the gently lilting ‘Sweet’, meanwhile, showcase Gonzalez’s ability to weave impressionistic snapshots of romance into melodies that haunt like memories of past loves, all coalescing around his melting vocals.

Elsewhere, Gonzalez mounts movies in miniature with the photographic references of ‘Flash’ and Fitzcarraldo echoes of ‘Opera House’, a song so lovingly languid it could, conceivably, soundtrack a man hauling ships over mountains for love. And, just as every good film-maker knows the need for a killer finale, so Gonzalez closes the album with the retro-romantic swing and teasingly filthy put-downs (the “sucking cock” lyric isn’t as barbed as it seems, just friendly joshing) of ‘Young & Dumb’, which brings the album to a close with good, timeless advice: “Drive your car to the beach with the song on repeat…”.

Join Cigarettes After Sex at Modern Sky Lab Shanghai on November 12, and be part of this monochromatic romantic world.