Cigarettes After Sex by Ebru Yildiz

How did it take rock ’n’ roll more than half a century to produce a band named Cigarettes After Sex? The wait for that flash of inspiration ended around 2008 when singer-guitarist Greg Gonzalez and a few friends in El Paso, Texas arrived with the evocative branding and a sound to match. Sultry, smoky, and laid back, Cigarettes After Sex are as warm and fuzzy as a postcoital embrace. If you like your music mellow but with an erotic charge, like say Mazzy Star or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Cigarettes After Sex could be your new favorite band.

And if you’re just now getting into them, your timing is exquisite. They’re making their South Florida concert debut. Just don’t expect a refund if they don’t look to you what they sound like. “Not long ago, we had someone come to the show and want their money back because I wasn’t a girl,” Gonzalez told Financial Times in 2020.

He told FT that his interest in sex as an expression not just of attraction, but of intimacy, goes beyond the band name. It also colors his lyrics. He loves the up-front sexual energy in club music. “But why can’t we have a narrative where I’m just telling a story about love and it includes sexuality?” he said.

Gonzalez also keys on the sense of place in his music. The band’s last album, 2019’s Cry, was recorded in a mansion on Mallorca, and in the press kit he likened the record to “a film … shot in this stunning, exotic location.” In their latest single, from November, a lonely protagonist drives out to the desert with a firearm to shoot off rounds in frustration over an absent lover. It’s called “Pistol,” but get your mind out of the gutter. The song “made me really emotional,” Gonzalez told Cosmopolitan India, “and I cried, pretty much every time I listened to it. It helped me process a bunch of feelings I went through last year.”

Cigarettes After Sex play 8pm Wednesday June 28 at FPL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park in Miami. cigarettesaftersex.com ~ David Rolland