Cigarettes After Sex at Wells Fargo Center

Should Your Tween Daughter be Listening to Cigarettes After Sex?: Live at Wells Fargo Center

by John Diliberto 9/4/2024

I went to a concert last night where I never felt more out of place. I go to a lot of shows like Washed Out, London Grammar, and Sigur Ros, where I am one of the older people in the audience, but I have never been to a show filled with mostly female tweens and teeny-boppers. At the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, I was surrounded by extremely young Gen-Z girls and younger side Millennial women, almost all dressed in extremely tight-fitting, micro-skirted black, with as much décolletage as a tween can muster. Many were sitting with their parents.

And who were these impressionable young women there to see? Cigarettes After Sex. Nothing overtly erotic in that name, right? I knew that somehow CAS had become a Tik-Tok viral sensation and Spotify playlist favorite. They have one song, “Apocalypse” with 1.5 billion listens. But I would’ve never suspected that this is the audience that took them from venues of 1200 at Union Transfer in 2018, to 3000 at Franklin Music Hall, and now, the 21,000 seat Wells Fargo Center, the largest indoor venue in Philadelphia. It wasn’t sold out, but it was pretty full.

And what was getting these screaming tweens and very young adults pumped up? It wasn’t the extravaganza of a Taylor Swift Era’s show or the circus of Pink. It wasn’t even the dynamism of Bruce Springsteen.  It was a trio of musicians on guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, with a grey-on-black barebones set design that featured some smoke, a scrim-like lighting effect that put the band in a cube, along with three screens that projected images of the band. That’s it. It had to be the most minimal presentation of a pop band in arena history. The band barely moved. Greg Gonzalez is Cigarettes After Sex and at 41-years old, he could be the father of these fans. He isn’t displaying the usual rock bravado and certainly had no dance moves. He seemed a little uncomfortable even swaying to his songs. When they performed live on Echoes in 2017, there wasn’t even any of that: he stood stock still while performing. In concert, when he occasionally moved to the forward proscenium to be closer to the definitely-not mosh pit, it was like, “I guess I’ll wander out there for a second.”

CAS is not arena music, it’s intimate and personal. Gonzalez sings in a pillow talk voice over reverb-drenched guitar arpeggios, while his band maintains a steady pulse. There are no broad dynamics, no sudden shifts of rhythm and no guitar pyrotechnics, except on the second-to-last number, a deep track called “Dreaming of You” from the EP titled I. Gonzalez shredded it even more live.

There are some who think every song by CAS sounds the same, and there is a certain truth to that. They are all low-key, sub-downtempo, with the exact same instrumentation, similar grooves and a limited range of effects, mainly reverb and delay on the guitar. But this audience knew every song and would elicit ear-piercing screams upon recognition. They also knew all the words, singing along in a far more exuberant delivery than Gonzalez. I don’t know what the parents thought when their daughters shouted out lines like:

We wanted to fuck with real love
Wanted it sweet, so pure and warm
Never only sleepin’ over
We wanted to fuck like all the time

Those are from “Tejano Blue” off the latest album, X’s

It’s lyrics like those and other songs of love, lust, and breaking up that have always made me think of Cigarettes After Sex as music for adults. The sound is subtle. There are none of those Taylor Swift hooks or Dua Lipa dance beats. CAS is the definition of low-key. It’s a dream pop noir in which you immerse yourself while drifting in the haze-filled lust of Gonzalez. There is a reason his latest album is called X’s.

Cigarettes After Sex in an arena is a mis-match. They are too intimate and they need to be fully alive. Instead, they seemed locked into their click track and some spare backing tracks. That didn’t matter to this audience, who are used to completely pre-fab shows. They were enthralled and they should have been as CAS wove their sensual spell.  I suspect that his fans, if they weren’t being chaperoned by their parents, probably would have lit one up after the show.

Hear Cigarettes After Sex playing live on Echoes here.