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Cigarettes After Sex

El Paso, TX

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Cigarettes After Sex built a devoted international following around a minimalist, extremely slow-tempo take on dream pop, built on Greg Gonzalez's deep, breathy near-whispered vocals layered over sparse, reverb-heavy guitar and understated production. Their 2017 self-titled debut album, built on songs Gonzalez had written and refined over more than a decade before the band's breakthrough, became a major streaming-era success story, with the band's atmospheric sound finding a particularly strong audience through curated mood-based playlists. Gonzalez's androgynous, deliberately affectless vocal delivery became one of the most distinctive and immediately recognizable vocal styles in contemporary dream pop, distinguishing the band's sound clearly from both its 1990s genre predecessors and its more immediate 2010s contemporaries. Their combination of their distinctively minimalist sonic approach and their significant streaming-era commercial breakthrough has made Cigarettes After Sex one of the most commercially successful dream pop acts of the genre's most recent generation.

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