If _Casablanca_ were a softcore porno, Cigarettes After Sex’s latest album _Cry_ would do the scoring. Frontman Greg Gonzalez is an acrobat in the art of musical erotica. Tightrope walking the line between vulnerability and vulgarity. At his best, he balances on the rope well. Almost invasive, as Gonzalez purrs in your ear like a humid breath. He saunters along until it’s so steamy, you could draw a heart in the condensation with your finger.
When I first met Gonzalez, we gathered in the back of Brooklyn Steel before his show. It was an all-black room prepped with snacks and refreshments. For a person who writes lyrics like _...you are the patron saint of sucking cock_ Gonzalez does not fit the expected mold. His voice was gentle, never peaking above a library whisper. Each of his answers settled quietly, like dust between the pages of a forgotten Encyclopedia. At times, I was so terrified the buzz of the mini-fridge next to us was drowning out his voice, that I would lunge the recorder closer.
He remained unphased by my teasing questions, like _So, you like cigarettes after sex. What are your thoughts on juuling after jerking off?_ And responded to them with the same unruffled normality as if discussing the weather. Gonzalez is an intensely thoughtful thinker. Each reply was a deep meditation. He knotted his fingers when he spoke, like he was weaving together his own body.
One of _Cry_’s most head-turning tracks is titled “Hentai” after the Japanese pornographic subgenre of manga and anime. The song is about the time when Gonzalez was telling his girlfriend about a surrealist hentai video he saw once. When often playing with visceral sexual motifs and gritty imagery, “Hentai” was a song he debated with filtering himself most on the album.
**What do you feel the difference is between erotica and pornography lyrically?**
We kind of say one is art, and the other is not. But for me it’s like, how do you say something eloquently and make it beautiful. And to not make it too raw, where it just sounds vulgar?
**So is Hentai a favorite genre of yours?**
\[Laughs\] I’d say it’s an interesting genre. I think people should just experiment with everything. I grew up in a house where there was just softcore porn around. And I grew up watching it.
**Were there others?**
No it’s an interesting story where my dad worked in video retailing. And meaning like he would go to a VHS rental store, and be like, “Hey you guys should rent this movie or this movie.” And so they would send us these boxes like promotional copies of VHS tapes. And it was like a huge box we would get every week. And in those boxes there would be blockbuster movies, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones. Another box would be Disney movies, or crazy B- horror movies. And then there would also be softcore porn in there.
**Right, and you were like I might as well try everything! Do you think that might have influenced your comfort with explicit sexuality and the way you address it in your music?**
Yeah, so I might as well see what kind of mood you get off each style of cinema. I was pretty young, that was during puberty for me. Yeah it does. For me having that experience, it was very positive. It felt like I saw the positivity in sex at a young age. There was never any shame to it. It’s all for the romance and for the beauty of it. But I feel like that’s probably where it started from, probably scenes and images. Because the softcore porn back then was very gentle. Because hardcore pornography was hard to watch for me.
**Wow imagine if you’d grown up watching hardcore porn. What kind of music do you think you’d be making now?**
Oh I’d definitely be in a screamo metal band, for sure.
**A change of gears here, you’ve said this album was really difficult for you to complete. But once you fell in love, all the pieces came together and you were able to finish. Why do you think love is what glues this album together.**
I just decided to be what I thought was a modern romance writer. And I thought that I wasn’t really seeing artists that were only writing about romance. And I would love when an artist would write about romance. And when they’d change, I think “oh, I’m not really on board with this anymore.” It’s always love songs that speak to me. And the thing that I love to write about most is romance too. It feels like it’s so natural to do that. If I have to write about other things, it doesn’t feel honest. So, with _Cry_ I was trying to write the lyrics like two years ago, before I met my girlfriend, and I really just didn’t have anything. Like I was seeing people then, but it wasn’t anything deep enough to influence me. It was all shallow.
**Do you think that you rely on those intense emotions, like shattering heartbreak or head-over-heels in love, to find inspiration?**
I have needed that, yes. Especially for what I’m doing here. ‘Cause these are like memoirs and stuff. And it’s just like, okay that’s a true story. There are songs that are totally invented. On the new record, there are works of fantasy too. So now I think of a muse in my songs to revolve these fantasies around. On a song like “Kiss It Off Me” on the new record, I invent new characters. And that’s a bit more like screen-writing. Just saying what would happen if I was telling the romance story about two characters who never existed. They aren’t my experiences per say, but I feel like I can kind of see the realism of the relationship there. And kind of give details that would stick out to me if I did live that experience. Yeah so it’s kind of strange, right?
**You chose to record the album in Majorca, Spain. What about that place amplified what you were trying to do with _Cry_?**
We had never done anything like that. We had recorded the first album in my stairway in my hometown. And the second thing was done in a tiny rehearsal space in Brooklyn, during the dead of winter. So I decided to do our summery location now, just to totally change things up. There’s more of a landscape to me on _Cry_. And it just really relaxed us. We recorded this album in a courtyard outside under the stars. I think it gave us this elemental feeling somehow. I’ve always felt like music should have this effect of nature at its most powerful. It should feel like looking up at the stars or being at the shore of the sea. In the album where we recorded it in my stairway, we realized we needed to play it a lot slower due to the echoing. So that was super eye-opening, realizing that we were playing these songs at a much slower pace than someone else might.
**And that’s why so many people say they fall asleep to your songs! Which I know you take as a compliment. At the end of each album, you should have an alarm clock song to wake everyone back up.**
Yeah where we are just raging or something. And finally at the end it’s just distortion. That’s a good idea. I give you credit for that.
**The band’s name Cigarettes After Sex definitely implies a specific aesthetic, connotation, and sound that is strung along with it. Do you think that can be limiting for your own sound and the music you create?**
So I was very deliberate to make everything so cohesive. And if you want to find someone like us, you’ll just go very deep into the sound. And everything you find by us is just this one sound that you can dissolve into. It’s almost like a safe haven. If someone is like, “Okay the music of Cigarettes is going to help me relax and I’ll go to sleep and it’s gonna be about romance.” It feels very brave and good to do that. To say, Okay this is the place you are going to be for that kind of music. But actually it’s exciting to me if we start to break our own rules. And say like, okay the next record is all red. And it sounds nothing like the sound before.
**What would all red sound like to you?**
The sound would totally change. It would be very exciting to make that big jump to something different. It feels like since we’ve been so cohesive, any movement we make is gonna be like kind of eventful. I think the next record will be like that. Even I feel like I have reached the end of what I can do with what we did with this last record. I’d love to make a modern pop album. I was thinking, what if there is a way to make us sound like club music, but keep our essence?
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