Artist: Cigarettes After Sex
Label: Partisan Records
Release Date: May 15, 2017
Track Name: “Each Time You Fall in Love”
Cigarettes After Sex’s new track “Each Time You Fall in Love” is a slow repose into a hazy serenade to non-commitment.
Greg Gonzales started Cigarettes After Sex in 2008 in El Paso, Texas, and recorded the first EP, I, in the stairwell of his university. The result of an unexpected experiment, I grew in popularity through YouTube’s algorithm for music recommendations. Gonzales spoke about their rise to popularity in a Rolling Stone interview, describing it as a “total mystery.” Since their auspicious inception and growing acclaim, the group has relocated to Brooklyn, and has put forth its latest effort.
The band’s new track’s sound exists somewhere between the Cocteau Twins and The xx. The song communicates a enigmatically melancholic landscape characterized by an inner indecisiveness and discontent. Gonzales sings of a love that’s never enough, of a tendency to guard and never give into emotion. In the quiet acoustic swell of the chorus we get a glimpse of who might’ve been culpable for the subject’s forlorn state; however, just as soon as it appears, it’s gone. Its a song with which you can lie in bed, or drive out into the sunset, though maybe not with the same optimism and content the phrase usually suggests. Ending with the same lyrics he started with, its clear that an escape from this space might not be so easy, if at all, possible.
Listen to “Each Time You Fall in Love,” below, and make sure to catch the band at the Irenic on September 15.