Why is Gen Z so obsessed with Cigarettes After Sex?

The Cigarettes After Sex concert at Vorst Nationaal/Forest National sold out in minutes. Without being played on the radio or releasing a single video and, above all, without communicating on social media, the US band is ultra-popular with Generation Z. We pulled out our lighters for an illuminating look at this phenomenon.

Formed in 2008 around the lone voice of Greg Gonzalez, Cigarettes After Sex is the official receptacle for the singer’s heartaches. Love, desire, disillusionment, and melancholy are invariably woven into his songs: dreamy and ethereal tunes whose languid melancholy evokes the exploits of both Beach House and Julee Cruise and reflects the influence of Mazzy Star and the late Françoise Hardy.

Guitar in hand, with a heavy heart, the brooding Greg Gonzalez releases his expired emotions alongside the bassist Randall Miller and the drummer Jacob Tomsky. Together, they recorded three singles with relative but moderate success: “K.”, “Apocalypse”, and “Sweet”, all from the trio’s first album released in 2017. Since then, dead silence. Cigarettes After Sex tracks struggled to make it onto the airwaves. Meanwhile, the band’s albums multiplied (and blended together) without making waves.

Released on the quiet this summer, X’s, the band’s third attempt at a discography as refined as it is monotonous, illustrates what the media reception has been like for Cigarettes After Sex: not one word written about the band on the influential website Pitchfork, and only a small column, accompanied by a scathing 5/10, in the magazine Uncut.

In France, the writers of Rolling Stone were kinder, with a score of 3/5. Nonetheless, the article about the new album by Cigarettes After Sex highlighted the project’s stagnation: “Greg Gonzalez opts for repetition, or at least familiarity, this time telling a love story from A to Z.”

Stadium tour

The limited enthusiasm of the French media did not stop the trio from filling the Accor Arena in under 24 hours. It is the same story in Belgium: all the tickets that went on sale for the concert at Vorst Nationaal/Forest National were gone within minutes. This phenomenon is not limited to Brussels and Paris. It is a global shock wave. India, South Korea, Australia, Greece, Thailand, Germany, South Africa, and Hong Kong: all the biggest venues in the world are welcoming Cigarettes After Sex for sold-out concerts.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, the band is even scheduled to perform at Beach City International Stadium, a venue with a capacity of 20,000. “When I was a kid, I was a Queen superfan,” Greg Gonzalez confided during one of his rare interviews. “I had the cassette tape of their concert in Wembley. We haven’t played there yet. But after filling a venue like Madison Square Garden in New York, now I’m thinking anything is possible.”

So, who goes to see the band in concert? To make sense of the (large) Cigarettes After Sex fanbase, we must turn to Generation Z: people born between 1997 and 2010. Strangely, the project carried by the androgynous voice of Greg Gonzalez sidesteps all the current rules for achieving stardom. Rarely played on the radio, stingy with interviews, the trio has not produced a single music video and never appears on the covers of albums. Add to that an almost ghost-like presence on social media, where black and white visuals are pos(t)ed once in a blue moon. In the age of the cult of personality and all things digital, the triumph of Cigarettes After Sex is undoubtedly an anomaly.

Distress signal

Regarding the band’s timeline, it was at the peak of COVID that the trio’s popularity first began to take off. A tailor-made soundtrack to the melancholy of a world at standstill, the music of Cigarettes After Sex undeniably crystallised the doubts and the emotional distress of a generation weaned on crises of all kinds (climate, health, economic, and political).

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, stress at school, prejudice against minorities, and the emergence of a parallel life on social media also darken daily life for Generation Z, already seriously unsettled by the blunders of previous generations. In England, in the 18-24 age group, one in three young people now say that they suffer from a “common” mental health issue, such as depression or an anxiety disorder. That number rose from just one in four in 2000, according to the journalist James Tapper, in an article published in The Guardian last spring.

Happy to be unhappy

In that context, the music of Cigarettes After Sex became like a safe haven. Played on a loop during the lockdown, the band’s songs are now achieving dizzying numbers, with 25 million listeners per month on Spotify and nearly 7 billion views on TikTok.

Lizzy Szabo, the curator of many Spotify playlists, reacted to those numbers in an article about the phenomenon in the men’s magazine GQ. “On our streaming platform, 75% of Cigarettes After Sex listeners are members of Generation Z,” she says. “Many listeners go on Spotify to listen to music in response to an emotion or a situation, rather than for an artist or a genre. Songs by Cigarettes After Sex have become mainstays of playlists entitled ‘Sad Indie’ or ‘When You Need a Good Cry’. It’s introspective music,” she explains. “You can apply it to your life or simply allow it to be the soundtrack to whatever you are doing.”

Thus, the melancholy romanticism of Cigarettes After Sex fuels the passions of a generation that is tossed about between its first emotional upheavals and the trials of an epoque that is severely deranged. That may not change the minds of those who think that the music of Cigarettes After Sex has little to offer. The fact remains that the US band’s songs provide enough glamour and gloom for the fans to be happy to be unhappy.