CIGARETTES AFTER SEX in concert at the Forum on November 1st and a new album (Info and Tickets)

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX! they will be the protagonists of a unique date to be held on Friday 1 November 2024 at the Milan Forum.

The event will be an opportunity to listen live to the new album “X’s”, released on 12 July 2024 via Partisan Records, of which the first single anticipating the project was released today, Tejano Blue.

THE NEW RECORD

Their new LP entitled “X’s” (out July 12th Partisan Records) is full of raw, imaginative, sometimes scabrous vignettes, cut onto enchanting slow pop songs; band leader Greg Gonzalez captures every emotion inspired by a romantic arc. But while previous albums have drawn from a mixture of relationships, “X’s” focuses on just one relationship that has stayed with him for four years.

The record sounds brutal,” Gonzalez admits. “I could sit down and talk about this loss with someone, but I wouldn’t scratch the surface.

I really have to write about it, sing about it, make music about it and only then can I start analyzing it and learning from it. Or just relive it, in a way. I don’t have that ‘Eternal Sunshine’ thing of wanting to forget.”

Continuing to look to classic pop song structures, Gonzalez has moved away from previous sonic reference points of the ’50s and ’60s, now finding himself drawn to a ’70s/’80s slow dance. While (in typical Cigarettes fashion) these changes may be subtle, the overall energy feels like tears reflected from a disco ball onto the dance floor.

THE SINGLE

Also released is the first single from the album, “Tejano Blue,” an homage to the music of band leader Greg Gonzalez’s Texas childhood, harking back to a more memorable (and livelier tempo) version of the sultry love songs and timeless of the band itself.

Gonzalez explains:

I grew up in El Paso and Tejana music is huge there. You could go to many of the city’s bars and hear artists like Selena, Los Ángeles Azules and La Mafia playing from the speakers. It was the atmosphere around me at the time, but I always rejected it, attracted by other things. Years later, when I was living in New York City, I finally started listening to Selena’s ‘Como La Flor’, around the same time I was listening to a lot of the Cocteau Twins. I had the idea then to try to combine both of their sounds in some way, which seemed a little strange, but which I felt could come from an authentic place of rediscovery and finally connecting with the music I heard around me in the my youth.”

Their discography today counts over 2.5 million records sold, 3 billion streams on Spotify, over 23 million monthly listeners and more than 800 million streams on YouTube. Their music has also been used approximately 6.4 billion times on TikTok. As of 2023, they have sold more than 200,000 tickets globally, despite their last album being released in 2019.