The art of being lazy: How Cigarettes After Sex made ennui romantic
When the world feels like it’s moving too fast, there’s always the temptation of defiant withdrawal—the kind that holds its hands up in resignation, willing a quieter, more peaceful state of mind away from the chaos. Though necessary for peace, this romantic retreat still holds an undercurrent of rebellion, the sure-of-itself kind like the Cigarettes After Sex lyric: “This is where I want to be, where it’s so sweet and heavenly.”
Emerging somewhat accidentally after Greg Gonzalez dated someone who would immediately light up after the act in bed, Cigarettes After Sex emerged as the trusty go-to for all those romantic scenes, with songs that sound and feel like the crackle of a candle flame late at night, secluded from the world in vulnerable bliss. A haven filled with nothing except sleepy touches, softly spoken mumbles, and the closeness of the smoke-filled air.
The familiarity of each song lies in this core strength, of nights spent ruminating on love lost, love gained, and everything that evokes the same enticement as experiencing romance in slow motion and getting high on its gratification. While the stories themselves differ, from the longing throughout ‘K’ to the simplicity of falling in ‘Heavenly’, the songs feel like wallowing in the safety of the four walls of the bedroom, a head swimming with fondness and a heart weakened by softness and desire.
In Gonzalez’s world, the sweet spot lingers exactly here, where the sharpened edges of the mind become blurry, and everything else becomes distorted by an overly nostalgic lens, like capturing lost footage of old romances long dissipated by the hands of time and circumstance. That said, much of what makes the music work, at least emotionally, is that it feels somewhere sluggishly familiar, even if the details become lost somewhere along the way.
“Maybe it’s a sense of place, which is what I wanted from the records,” Gonzalez told Vice in 2016. “Going back to my influences, like on Aphex Twins’ Ambient Works II, it feels like you’re in a space, like you’re actually in a landscape, and I wanted that sense too—it makes you feel like you’re somewhere, like there’s this depth of place in the songs.” Along with the singer’s androgynous voice, the music compels with heady ambiguity, reminiscent of lazing around, alluding to a sort of therapeutic catharsis where the mind ventures free.
Although Gonzalez’s various influences can be heard throughout almost every song, from the swirling romanticism of Françoise Hardy and Miles Davis’ “midnight sound” to The Cocteau Twins, the hues of Cigarettes After Sex become less about who exists where and more about accepting the beauty of being idle. It’s like “medicine”, Gonzalez argues, especially when “you have it for one specific time, where you need to go really deep into that feeling”.
The soothing atmospheres, therefore, have always been deliberate, there to lull you into gorgeous inertia, like giving in to the temptation of letting go in moments when the heart sinks beneath the surface. For Gonzalez, these moments of feeling “distraught” always lead to him reaching for the right music to remedy the brain “going a thousand miles a minute”. As a result, listening to Cigarettes After Sex is supposed to feel like “a force of nature in some way”, Gonzalez told The Line of Best Fit, adding, “It should feel like a beach at night, with a bonfire.”
This is precisely how the songs meander through the subconscious, like delicate yet confident musings about the different flavours of romance, whether the good, the bad, or the ugly. It’s overthinking our own memories and perceptions while understanding that this is the reality we’ll only ever know. It’s distorted, but only by the authenticity of pure emotion, holding onto heartache like a spinning wheel of constant rumination, even in its slowed-down state.
