X’s

X’S BY CIGARETTES AFTER SEX: GRIEF ARCHITECTURE IN TEN SLOW FRAMES

Cigarettes After Sex’s X’s (Partisan Records, July 2024) is the El Paso-bred band’s third studio album — a ten-track ambient pop record that channels the wreckage of a four-year relationship through reverb-drenched guitars, velvet-register vocals, and the unhurried pulse of 1970s and 1980s slow-dance balladry.
It is the third studio album by the American ambient pop band, released on July 12, 2024, through Partisan Records.
Produced in its entirety by frontman Greg Gonzalez, X’s expands the band’s tonal palette just enough to register as a refinement — a deliberate, structurally coherent document of romantic dissolution that arrives as the group’s most chart-successful release to date.

PRODUCTION ARCHITECTURE: THE WEIGHT OF MINIMALISM

Recording sessions for the album took place from August 2020 to February 2022 in Los Angeles.
That two-year gestation window is audible in the results: X’s is Cigarettes After Sex’s most sonically considered LP, even if its surface textures remain deliberately opaque.
Greg Gonzalez handled writing, vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and production, with Randy Miller on bass, Jacob Tomsky on drums, Jeff Kite on keyboards, Anthony Gallo on mixing, and Greg Calbi on mastering.
The division of labour is tidy and revealing — Gonzalez controls the conceptual, harmonic, and tonal centre of the record; everyone else holds the frame steady.

An ambient pop and shoegaze album, X’s sees Gonzalez exploring “slow-dance pop ballads” of the 1970s and 1980s, while the lyrics deal with romance and intimacy.
The shift from the 1950s and 1960s reference points of the self-titled debut is audible in the low-end: Miller’s bass moves with more gravitational pull here, sitting higher in Anthony Gallo’s mix at Virtue & Vice Studios, lending tracks like “Dark Vacay” and closer “Ambien Slide” a density that the earlier catalogue rarely attempted.
“Ambien Slide” ends the record on “a moody riff and punchy bassline,” closing out the album “on a subtle yet refreshing level of intensity.”

Gonzalez’s guitar work on X’s is built on familiar foundations — extended reverb tails, clean single-note lines that sit in a high-mid register — but the stereo field is markedly wider than on Cry (2019). Jeff Kite’s keyboard contributions are placed deep in the low mids, functioning more as textural colour than harmonic load-bearing; they suggest warmth without insisting on it. Greg Calbi’s mastering at Sterling Sound ensures the record travels with consistent loudness across streaming and vinyl formats — a pragmatic consideration for a band whose listener base skews heavily toward mobile listening in ambient contexts.
The blissful, mid-tempo template embraced again on X’s is “sonically luscious, softly melodic, the guitars typically reverbed.”

The title track is the cleanest distillation of the album’s tonal logic: a suspended major chord over a walking bass pattern, Gonzalez’s vocal sitting just above the mix’s noise floor, the whole construction balanced on the edge of resolution without ever quite landing.
The title track “emerges with dreamy riffs, whispery vocals and smooth basslines to instantly grab your attention.”
“Silver Sable” and “Hideaway” follow the same low-BPM architecture but introduce slight variations in chord voicing — a subtle flattened seventh here, a plagal cadence there — that reward close listening without advertising themselves. If you’re looking for a companion release that pursues similar slow-burn textural strategies from a different angle, TV Girl’s The Night in Question: French Exit Outtakes makes for an interesting parallel study in the emotional economy of restraint.

SONGWRITING AND THE ANATOMY OF A FOUR-YEAR LOSS

The band’s lead musician Greg Gonzalez stated that the album “feels brutal” to him, revealing how he had to “write” and “sing” about the loss of a four-year relationship, instead of just talking about it which would simply “scratch the surface.”
That confessional directive shapes every compositional decision on X’s. Unlike his previous albums, which sourced imagery from multiple relationships and experiences,
where previous albums drew from an amalgam of relationships, X’s centralizes on just one relationship that spanned four years.
The structural focus tightens the lyrical register considerably.

The tender “Tejano Blue” was inspired by the singer’s experiences growing up in El Paso and “gorgeously combines Tejano music (Selena’s ‘Como La Flor’ being a particular influence) with his love of Scottish dream pop pioneers Cocteau Twins.”
That geographic-emotional crossing is one of the album’s most interesting formal moves: a border-town sensibility filtered through the chilly reverberance of Glasgow post-punk. The result is a song that manages to carry both registers simultaneously without sounding schizophrenic — a balance that speaks to Gonzalez’s instinct for tonal unity.

Lyrically, X’s operates through accumulation of specific, often domestic detail.
The music is “awash in moody guitars, refracted atmospherics, lounge-core beats and dreamy narratives that flitter around minute details that carry greater emotional weight than their surface descriptions,” with the opening title track delivering romantic musings “through the rose-colored view of someone in love with every bit of their partner, including their flaws.”
This is Gonzalez’s strongest lyrical tendency: the everyday as elegy. A Marilyn Monroe photoshoot reference in the title track, a drug-fuelled summer in Prague on “Dark Vacay,” the cinematic desperation of “Dreams From Bunker Hill” — each lyric plants a location before cutting the ground from under it.

Gonzalez’s vocal performance on X’s continues to resist easy gendered classification.
The biggest draw remains “the soothing vocals of frontman Greg Gonzalez, a singer harbouring a style ambiguous in gender and almost erotic in nature.”
That androgyny is not affectation but a genuine feature of his upper-register timbre — a light falsetto-adjacent delivery that sits around the E4–A4 range and functions as a kind of tonal neutraliser, making the intimacy of the lyrics feel universal rather than positioned.
AllMusic’s Heather Phares suggested the album “frequently feels like some of their most personal work” while still managing to “deliver enough glamorous brooding to keep fans happily miserable.”

“Dark Vacay” recalls a drug-fuelled summer of romance with a former partner in Prague “and contains more claustrophobic aspirations,” while “Baby Blue Movie” urges the listener to find fulfilment in their current love over an unrealistic ideal.
The sequencing is careful: the record opens in the register of active desire and closes in the register of attrition, the emotional arc moving from infatuation through ambivalence to the medicated blur suggested by “Ambien Slide.”