• Cigarettes After Sex "Cry" Cassette

PARTISAN RECORDS

Arrival on 3rd-4th week of August 23

Cassette version!

It feels almost like a novelty these days for a dude to write an album entirely about being extremely horny. Men don’t make music about sex the way they used to. We are far past the epoch of Serge Gainsbourg writing pop songs that involved Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot mimicking the sounds of orgasm. People have more or less collectively agreed that rendering women as pure sex objects in music doesn’t need to happen so much anymore. Greg Gonzalez, the frontman of the noir dream-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, must not have gotten the memo. He operates within a space of midcentury sexual anachronism. His second record, Cry, is a 41-minute dream about Penthouse pets and women in silken underthings, filtered through chiaroscuro and top-shelf whiskey. There is a universe where this raciness could conceivably offer a reprieve from indie rock’s occasional prudishness. Unfortunately, Gonzalez’s candor about his desire comes off as lifeless and borderline asinine.