Last month, Cigarettes After Sex announced their new LP X's out on July 12, 2024 via Partisan Records — alongside their upcoming world tour, which features shows at some of the globe's most iconic venues, like Madison Square Garden and London's O2 Arena, with more dates in Korea, India, Singapore, UAE, Taiwan and South America to be announced at a later date.
Today, they share the second cut from their forthcoming album, entitled Dark Vacay. Filled with raw, imagistic, sometimes smutty vignettes set to entrancing, slow-burn pop songs, bandleader Greg Gonzalez captures every emotion a romantic arc inspires. The track conflates hedonistic European tour memories — running around Prague, giddy and punch drunk — with his more recent experiences unraveling in close quarters on the road with an ex-love.
He goes on to explain, “This song is about a romance I had a few years ago. We went on tour together & were lucky enough to go to all these wonderful places, mostly having fun at first. As the tour continued though, everything started falling apart & we ended up breaking up by the end of it. I was left wishing that we were somehow able to see all of the beauty around us before it was too late..."
Listen to Dark Vacay here: cigsaftersex.lnk.to/darkvacay
Download the WAV here: https://we.tl/t-Xp9IHgeHDW
Pre-order the new X's album: cigsaftersex.lnk.to/_Xs
Since the release of Tejano Blue, with the announcement of X’s and the corresponding global arena tour, Cigarettes After Sex have racked up 20M plays on the single, which was featured on 43 Spotify New Music Friday playlists, alongside a digital billboard in Times Square. They are currently the #250 most-streamed artist in the world on the platform, with over 25M monthly listeners. The tour — which includes venues like Madison Square Garden, The Forum, the o2 Arena and more — is off to a tremendous start with sellouts in London, Warsaw, Sydney, Athens, Brussels, Lyon, Cape Town and more. Over 400K tickets have been sold internationally thus far and demand saw them adding extra shows in LA, London, Athens, Melbourne, and Sydney. The news spread quickly, with writeups in Stereogum, Consequence, Brooklyn Vegan, Pollstar, the NY Post and more. Enthusiasm for the track has led to early radio adds across the country at multiple formats, and a quick debut on the Alternative Top 40. All of this activity comes amid a flurry of growth on social media, with the band eclipsing the 4M follower mark on Instagram, and hitting half a Million on TikTok with only three posts on the platform. Not content to let new music have all the shine, the band’s self-titled record just enjoyed a new chart peak on the Billboard 200 in its 50th week on the chart.
With X’s, Cigarettes After Sex finally takes center stage as not just one of today’s preeminent indie bands, but as one of the most globally accomplished acts across any genre, whose often unconventional path to superstardom has helped reshape the very definition of success for artists in the modern era.