Review: This is one of the most surprising success stories in music history

Cigarettes After Sex is one of the biggest surprise success stories in music history.

The El Paso, Texas, trio makes lo-fi dream-pop music — the kind that would seem way more at home being played in a quirky David Lynch movie than some big sports arena — drawing inspiration from such varied sources as Miles Davis and the Cowboy Junkies.

The band’s sound, however, is unflinchingly consistent, to the point where the uninitiated could be forgiven for believing that Cigarettes After Sex really only has one song — which is then played with different lyrics and goes by about three dozen different titles

The ceiling on a act like this, traditionally, has been headlining theaters and small clubs.

Yet, here we are in 2024 and Cigarettes After Sex are the hottest band in all of rock — with a tour that is drawing full houses to major basketball/hockey arenas across the country.

And the trio deserves every bit of that success, a point that was underscored most recently when Cigarettes After Sex delivered a gorgeous evening of ambient-pop and shoegaze-y indie rock before a packed house of some 13,000 fans at Oakland Arena on Saturday night. It was the first Cigarettes After Sex appearance in the Bay Area since performing an equally enjoyable set during the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 2023.

Led by singer-songwriter-guitarist Greg Gonzalez — who was flanked onstage to his left by bassist Randall Miller and to his right by drummer Jacob Tomsky — Cigarettes After Sex opened the 80-minute show (featuring no opening act) right at 9 p.m. with a mesmerizing version of “X’s,” the title track of the group’s most recent album as well as the namesake of the current tour.

They’d proceed to cast a mighty spell over the mostly young audience members, whose average age appeared to be around half of that of the 42-year-old lead singer. The way these fans passionately sang along to the lyrics made it clear that they had not just memorized, but rather ingrained, the blunt yet poetic lyrics of love, sex, infatuation and varied kinds of intoxication through countless spins on Spotify, YouTube and other streaming platforms.

The sound in the nearly 60-year-old arena was crystal clear and the live renditions of these songs came across, to the penny, like the recorded versions. The result was that it felt like we’d all just collectively slipped on a giant pair of headphones and pushed play on a really superb Cigarettes After Sex playlist.

Gonzalez and company continued to softly construct each new number, moving through “You’re All I Want,” “Dark Vacay” and “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” with the steady precision of an origami master folding up a new creation. And each offering was greeted with a wave of shrill excitement from the young crowd, approximating what one would hear at an Olivia Rodrigo show. (You’re much more likely to need ear protection for the crowd noise, rather than for the actual music, at a Cigarettes After Sex show.)

The stage show was appropriately minimal, with the video screens just showing black and white (and mostly unchanging) visuals of the three performers, and the lighting effects were used mostly to enhance the mediative mood.

The most entertaining visuals came from the crowd, which would use the flashlights on their phones to light up the arena like a starry, starry sky. As they slow danced with each other, or just swayed solo while mouthing the lyrics, the fans made it abundantly clear how much songs like “Tejano Blue” and “John Wayne” mean to them — even if many of them don’t know who John Wayne was.

The group played four songs off of “X’s,” the band’s third full-length outing, which came out in July. One of those tunes — the hypnotic “Dreams from Bunker Hill” — was the being played on Saturday for the very first time in concert, giving these fans bragging rights to say they’d caught a live debut.

The new record is really good — like album-of-the-year-consideration good. And I’m predicting that Grammy voters will agree and put “X’s” in the mix for the overall album of the year category at the 2025 award show, right alongside Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet.”

Despite a few minor tweaks here and there, the new album still boasts that classic Cigarettes After Sex ambient vibe, although overall sounding a bit less like the soundtrack to a lost season of “Twin Peaks” than the previous two.

The band is still devoting the lion’s share of its time onstage to its eponymous first album — which remains the high point in the catalog — and delivered a half dozen of that record’s 10 tracks in Oakland. These were the cuts that resonated most strongly with the crowd, which took the Cigarettes After Sex mania to the next level as Gonzalez slipped into “Sweet,” “K.” and “Apocalypse.”

Cigarettes After Sex closed the show with another first album offering, “Opera House,” and then departed the stage, having thoroughly thrilled the crowd while writing yet another chapter in what is one of most surprising (and fulfilling) success stories in recent music history.

Setlist:
1. “X’s”
2. “Pistol”
3. “You’re All I Want”
4. “Dark Vacay”
5. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby”
6. “Touch”
7. “Dreams From Bunker Hill”
8. “Tejano Blue”
9. “John Wayne”
10. “Cry”
11. “Sweet”
12. “Sunsetz”
13. “Heavenly”
14. “K.”
15. “Dreaming of You”
16. “Apocalypse”
17. “Opera House”