Cigarettes After Sex – On The Band’s Music, Art and More

December 12, 2017

American ambient pop band Cigarettes After Sex recently performed in Pune at the NH7 Weekender. The band, based in Brooklyn, New York, consists of four members – Greg Gonzalez, Jacob Tomsky, Phillip Tubbs and Randall Miller.

They have seen success in the recent years with the release of singles and a new self-titled album. The dreamy and nostalgic music has been loved by fans all over the world. Their first performance in India, they say, felt like a long time coming. Pune365 interviews the band on its initial formation, its minimalist artwork and more.

You’ve performed in numerous countries including France, Austria, Japan and Indonesia. The lyrics of the songs seem to resonate with people cutting through language barriers and ethnicity, Did you expect this when you initially started writing the songs?

Love is a universal theme, so it makes sense to me that people from all over would relate to the music, if not the lyrics then just the feeling of the music. A lot of the great artists have done this and it’s exactly what I was aiming for, to be on the same level as the artists I admire.

When did you (Greg Gonzalez) start making music? How and when did the band members come together to form CAS?

I started making music around the age of 10 when I got my first acoustic guitar. Once I picked up the guitar, I started writing immediately, compulsively and its never ended to this day. As far as the band members of Cigarettes, I met Phillip Tubbs, the keyboard player, around 2009 in my hometown El Paso, Texas. He was a singer and songwriter in the local scene and we both began playing in each other’s groups around that time. I met both Jacob Tomsky and Randy Miller when I moved to Brooklyn. I had seen them play in a band together at a local show I put together at Cake Shop in Manhattan and thought they sounded as a rhythm section. This, the current iteration of the band came together in late 2014.

How big a role has social media and other platforms like YouTube played in the band’s success?

I’d say YouTube was the thing that did it for us. Some fans, out of the goodness of their heart, uploaded the music to YouTube very early on when it felt like nobody cared or was listening. Over the few years they stayed there, those songs started to see a steady, substantial amount of views and garnered what felt like a devoted number of fans scattered in different corners of the world. One day, when I created our own YouTube channel, finally released a new song after years of silence and promoted it a bit with Facebook things just took off. Something had been building for years to this.

The album art is always minimalist with less lighting and blurred subjects. How does the art reflect on your music?

With the art of the band, I wanted it to be a window into the philosophies and ideas behind the music. The way you get a sense of The Smiths’ style through their album artwork like nostalgic, fashionable, forward thinking with very personal references. I’m mostly looking for art that has a boldness in its simplicity and images that have the feelings I associate with our music like sensual, erotic, surreal, hazy and dark.