The real story behind Cigarettes After Sex song ‘Apocalypse’
In many ways, you could say that Cigarettes After Sex made their name on music that romanticises the art of being lazy. Breaking through the haze of mistaken shoegaze definitions was a vision based on the simple beauty of malaise, inside a place where quiet rebellion came in the form of holding your hands up and resigning to a blissful ignorance away from chaos.
“Maybe it’s a sense of place, which is what I wanted from the records,” Greg 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.”
It’s the kind of music that feels like “medicine”, Gonzalez added, particularly when “you have it for one specific time, where you need to go really deep into that feeling”. It’s easy to see why. Aside from the obvious emotional reaction of many of the songs, from ‘K’ to ‘Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby’, there’s a sluggishness to the arrangements and to Gonzalez’s vocals that pushes you into the deep euphoria of tapping out, like the only time you’ll ever feel content is when you’re being idle, the rest of the world shut out.
But this doesn’t just stop at the way the music sounds; it also permeates the subject matter, from longing and sexual desire to internal identity and general disillusionment. ‘K’, for instance, became the perfect soundtrack to countless television scenes because it’s effortlessly romantic with an edge that complements stories drenched in darkness, or tragedy, like forbidden love or a breakup that feels final, even if the two parties are soulmates.
But this also reaches the surface in ‘Apocalypse’, a song written about Gonzalez’s experiences with friends left behind who dreamed of one day making it out. When Gonzalez made it in the music industry, those friends came to mind, specifically how much they longed to break free from their own traps, all the same, but never quite made it in the same way. As the frontman explained to Cosmopolitan, the song morphed into an ode to being lost, companionship, and loneliness.
“The imagery is surreal, and it’s not something that could have happened,” Gonzalez said, “But, the way I think about that song is, before I left my hometown, it was me and two different girls I’d dated and then kind of become friends with. It felt that we were like beautiful losers—stuck in our hometown with these big ambitions. At that time, it felt like it was impossible to get out of the city, and so when I left and moved to New York, I thought about them again.”
He continued on the aspirations that they all had, and while he could set out to follow his dreams and move ahead in life, the friends remained where he had left them: “…they wanted to be screenwriters, painters and actors. But they were still in my hometown, kind of like the song says, ‘sort of trapped there’. They couldn’t help but be trapped there.” The singer admitted that he wrote the song with them in mind, wishing to find a way to get them out of the city. “Thus, the song at the end is really about being there for people, when you’re all alone”.
As someone who knows what it’s like to feel “repressed” in daily life, these words work so well against the arrangements because everything feels bittersweet; like saying you’ve not forgotten someone, but acknowledging that those memories don’t take away from the tragedy of people left behind to the hands of fate. There’s an intensity and a finality to it, but one that also feels inherently beautiful, mostly because it’s real and honest, like fate holds a weight that also provides a strange comfort if you exist within it, if you don’t push it away.
As Gonzalez puts it in the song: “You’ve been locked in here forever, and you just can’t say goodbye”.
