Cry Cigarettes After Sex

• 1 Don't Let Me Go 04:23
• 2 Kiss It Off Me 04:30
• 3 Heavenly 04:47
• 4 You're the Only Good Thing In My Life 04:35
• 5 Touch 04:53
• 6 Hentai 04:45
• 7 Cry 04:17
• 8 Falling In Love 04:06
• 9 Pure 04:15
• Total Runtime 40:31

Info for Cry

That marriage of sound and setting is the heart and soul of Cry, Cigarettes After Sex’s riveting sophomore album. Recorded in a stunning house on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the collection reflects the uneasy beauty, erotic longing, and stark minimalism of the space, all smooth lines and soft light. Energized by the fresh palette and setting, Gonzalez would write songs just minutes before recording them with the band—drummer Jacob Tomsky, bassist Randy Miller, and keyboardist Phillip Tubbs. He engineered and produced the sessions himself, with an emphasis on capturing live performances and exploring the material together in dialogue with the house and with each other.

Clocking in at nine songs, Cry is a compact collection, but its brevity belies its depth. While the band’s sound may be most associated with the romantic pop music of the late 50’s and early 60’s, Gonzalez pushes into more unexpected sonic territory on Cry, reaching back to his childhood in El Paso, Texas, to draw subtle melodic influence from 90’s Tejano stars like Selena and mainstream pop country artists like Shania Twain. Gonzalez pushes himself lyrically on the album, too, tackling sex with the graphic frankness of Henry Miller or Leonard Cohen as he renders unabashed, sometimes explicitly erotic scenes with a casual candor. Writing with a filmmaker’s eye, he captures tiny moments with a rich, cinematic detail that manages to locate the profound within the mundane.

“I’ve always avoided studios,” says Cigarettes After Sex frontman Greg Gonzalez. “There’s something special about recording out in the world, some kind of X-factor that comes from the character and atmosphere of wherever it is that you’re working that becomes essential to the feeling of the music.”

Greg Gonzalez and his bandmates—drummer Jacob Tomsky, bassist Randy Miller, and keyboardist Phillip Tubbs—arrived in Mallorca to begin recording ‘Cry’ happened to be the very week that their long-awaited, self-titled debut LP hit shelves in 2017. Hailed by Vice as “an overnight internet sensation eight years in the making,” Gonzalez released that album on the heels of an EP and a series of singles that had managed to rack up millions of plays on YouTube and launch him from recording in the stairwell of his hometown university to headlining shows around the world. The full-length collection earned international raves out of the gate, with The Independent praising it as “intimate and spectral” and Pitchfork describing it as “restrained, low-boil…where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.” Nearly every review honed in on the romantic darkness of the music and the haunting androgyny of Gonzalez’s vocals, and the album was a fixture on roundups and year-end lists: Rolling Stone named Cigarettes After Sex an Artist You Need To Know, NPR listeners voted them one of the year’s top new discoveries, and The Guardian dubbed the band’s “noir dreampop” as “among 2017’s best.” In addition to being a critical smash, the record was also a streaming juggernaut, approaching one billion plays across all platforms and landing the band dates on five continents along with festival slots from Primavera and Best Kept Secret to Lollapalooza and Reading & Leeds.

Greg Gonzalez, vocals, guitar
Randall Miller, bass
Jacob Tomsky, drums
Phillip Tubbs, keyboards

Cigarettes After Sex
The music of Cigarettes After Sex evokes not only the powerful sense of euphoria inherent in the band's name itself but also the feelings and emotions found in the most romantic films—painfully nostalgic, utterly captivating, and intensely visual. It is these unique qualities that allow Cigarettes After Sex’s love songs to resonate across countless countries and thrill a fiercely loyal fanbase.

To date, the band’s catalog has achieved sales of over 2.5 million records, 3 billion Spotify streams, more than 17 million monthly listeners, and over 800 million YouTube streams. Their list of fans includes everyone from Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey, Françoise Hardy, Lily Allen, and Busy Philipps to many others. Featured by Vice Noisey, V Magazine, Interview, and NPR's Tiny Desk, the band has also been showcased in *The Handmaid's Tale*, *Killing Eve*, and by Ralph Lauren.

This album contains no booklet.