Vinyl - Cigarettes After Sex - The Crystal Ship / Anna Karenina (7")
The song featured on the B-side, “Anna Karenina,” is a quintessential Cigs track, sensual, slow-burning, and emotionally oversized, with lyrics so confessional they verge on too much. But its inclusion of spoken word verses adds a striking new dimension to Greg Gonzalez’s world, expanding the band’s intimate palette. The A-side fan favorite finally seeing release: a gorgeous cover of The Doors’ “The Crystal Ship,” recast in the band’s signature haze.
Ten years ago Greg Gonzalez was having a really rough Valentine’s Day. Freshly heartbroken with no hope of reconciliation, he spent two hours driving from his hometown El Paso to play a show, and he listened to Sade’s “By Your Side” on repeat both ways. “The experience that day stuck in my bones—it was an idea that I couldn’t forget,” says Gonzalez, the frontman of Cigarettes After Sex. “I thought, how do I make a record that feels like that?”
With each record—the initial 2012 EP, 2017’s eponymous debut album, and 2019’s Cry— Gonzalez has been faithful to his muse: love. In raw, imagistic vignettes set to entrancing, slow-burn pop songs, Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. But where previous albums have drawn from an amalgam of relationships, for the most part, their third, eagerly anticipated LP, X’s, centralises on just one relationship that spanned four years.