Greg Gonzalez: Cigarettes After Sex frontman on going viral, writing explicit lyrics, and the ritual behind the band's name

Greg Gonzalez pauses for thought. It’s the sort of pause that could have come straight from one of the songs that make up his band Cigarette After Sex’s spacious dream-pop landscape. He’s pondering if the success of his project – in less than three years the Brooklyn-via-Texas pop-noir outfit have gone from virtual unknowns to selling out London's Brixton Academy – has all happened faster than might have been ideal.

“I wouldn’t say it was too quick,” he eventually says on the other end of the phone from El Paso. “But I didn’t know what was supposed to happen. We got into the bigger venues super quick. The band just expanded so quickly; we had no idea what we were doing. You have to adapt, and with that comes a learning curve. It’s better to be able to learn those lessons and come out more professional.”

He steadies himself. “But I always envisaged us being a huge band. I didn’t want us to be just an indie band. I was aspiring to be as big as the biggest artists I grew up with. I still am. I still feel that way."

If that was the aim, then so far so good. Cigarettes After Sex have circumvented perceived wisdom that indie bands are doomed in the modern age of declining sales and mundane Spotify playlists, by becoming an old-fashioned word-of-mouth triumph.

Formed in 2008, Gonzalez’ project was uniformly ignored until 2015 when “Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby”, a track from 2012 EP I., became an unlikely online sensation, racking up 65 million views. It was, as Gonzalez puts it, “basically like lightning striking. YouTube stars go viral, not really bands.”

Cigarettes After Sex haven’t looked back. Such is the surprise level of success – 175,000 album sales of last year’s self-titled debut album; more than 4 million streams, selling out the 5,000 capacity Brixton Academy – record label Partisan threw a party on the day of their last London show at the Roundhouse to celebrate.

Even legendary French singer Francois Hardy is a cheerleader. The respect is mutual. “It’s the greatest thrill of my life. Most surreal thing that’s ever happened was definitely meeting her. She keeps on talking about us, which is the craziest thing.”

Gonzalez has a playful side, but he takes the project immensely seriously. “I’d have died without this” he tells me at one point, and insists that even in the days of struggle, or the “days that have been erased” as he puts it, he wouldn’t have ever given up.

“It wasn’t in me to quit, it was too ingrained. I would have had to give up being myself”.

He speaks in a voice so deep it seems incompatible with the androgynous register on his songs that had many assuming Cigarettes After Sex had a female singer.

That is one of several aspects that make Cigarettes After Sex stand out from a congested dream-pop field, the most obvious being that name, coined after a “ritual I had with a friend with benefits”.

Depending on your viewpoint it’s either memorably throwaway or jarringly awful.

“Luckily most people love the name.” I’m not sure about that, I suggest. “The name is really loaded so I get what those people are saying. Maybe it’s a bit much. But I think it suits us well.”

Gonzalez is right: the name does suit the sound, though that wasn’t necessarily deliberate. Early incarnations of Cigarettes After Sex were more influenced by bands like New Order and Depeche Mode.

“After years and years of searching for an identity, the sound was arrived at. The name started, the sound caught up to it,” he says.

There are plenty of other contemporary bands that wear those colours too, but many are often unwilling, or unable, to couple the ethereal with actual tunes. Cigarettes After Sex have mastered both.

With a defined monochromatic aesthetic – Gonzalez operated a small movie theatre in New York and is obsessed with film – these are pop songs existing in an entirely self-contained world, the soundtrack to a moonlit road trip down the coast.

Conceptually, however, it’s very personal. The mini-narratives that float over the music are real life stories full of love and lust. “In my life I’m not vocal with my emotions, so it was a way of getting things out. I found it was the most natural thing to write about. When I got as personal as I could I felt exhilarated.”

He compares the detailed descriptions of relationships and random sexual encounters as like “looking at an old photo album” that he doesn’t mind revisiting night after night. “Even the bad times, it’s good to look back on them. I tend to visualise the lyrics a lot, singing the songs takes me back to rooms and landscapes and scenes, exactly what it was like.”

Sex is front and centre: the first verse of the album talks about “making love with no strings attached” and what follows is full of sexual (mis)adventure.

“I was wondering why sex wasn’t being discussed in a lot of music that I liked,” Gonzalez says. “It wasn’t being talked about in the more adult way I was looking for, and a lighter way, which is part of love, part of romance, or romance I’ve had at least. To tell the story I wanted to tell it had to be in there.”

That extends to a joking humour: “Young & Dumb” sees Gonzalez refer to a girlfriend as “the patron saint of sucking cock”, a sentiment you’re unlikely to find inscribed on a greeting card.

“There should be humour in love too. When you think about great romance there is a lot of humour. You have sex, passion, love, sweet romance and tenderness, but all the great loves have humour, the ability to make each other laugh.”

Have any of the protagonists had anything to say to him? “Luckily no, which is funny. Well, nothing menacing. There’s one girl I don’t talk to anymore so I have no idea what she thinks about it. But the other girls I’ve dated that I’ve written songs about seem flattered and fond of it, which is a sweet feeling.”

Has he ever thought twice about going into so much detail? “That happens all the time!” he says, animated. “I have to say, if I’m worried about it, it’s worth saying. If there’s something about it that’s triggering me in a way or I am challenging myself then I just do it anyway. They are the things people relate to most, those lines. I think it should be a little risky.”

Gonzalez seems more risk-averse when it comes to new music. Cigarettes After Sex have new songs due this year, with album to follow in 2019. But you can expect more of the same, he says.

“I don’t want us to take any sharp turns. I like the consistency of bands like Cocteau Twins, or when change is a more gradual thing. We might change the backbeats and a few small things, but it’ll be more of the same. Put it this way – we’re not going to go electro”.

Cigarettes After Sex play Brixton Academy 24 May