Cigarettes After Sex has had a recent uptick in popularity, reaching a wide variety of listeners and featured often in TikTok and Instagram videos. Their newest album “X” is a welcome continuation of this sound, adding slight variations to the themes and vibe that has come to be expected from their music.
The title track, “X”, is one of my personal favorites. As the title implies, it’s about remembering your ex and putting a rose-colored filter over those memories. The lyrics describe a relationship that on the surface, looks lovely and sweet, but some of the lyrics give way to an uneasy undercurrent. It brings the listener to wonder, ‘can anything really be that perfect?’
One fault this album has is that some of the songs are repetitive and lack the same depth that comes through in others from the album. “Holding you, Holding me” is the worst of these few. With an incredibly repetitious chorus and lyrics with about as much symbolism as blue curtains, this song describes the feeling of being content with your relationship and partner in the most eloquent words of a ten-year-old.
Around the sixth and seventh tracks, “Dark Vaycay” and “Baby Blue Movies,” is when things start to take a turn. The lyric “I’m a hurricane eye” in “Baby Blue Movies” implies that the relationship seems to be coming out of the control of the narrator and causing a swirling mess of emotions and events around him. “Dark Vaycay” describes his attempts to cope with the loss of the relationship, describing him going on a bender and trying to sort out his emotions.
While melodically these may not be the best on the album, lyrically they are rich with metaphor and imagery taking you on an emotional ride and giving the album some more credit for no longer being the lovey-dovey relationship songs they’ve written before, but now something more subversive and intriguing.
The final track of the album, “Ambien Slide” referencing the sleeping pill, fleshes out the story and gives it a consequential ending. Starting with a dreamy perfect relationship to coping with drugs and flings, It takes the lyrics from “X”, “Sweet how the Words Slip” and “Sleeping on your fingertips” and subverts them into describing the slide into depression after the breakup, “Giving into your Ambien slide,”
While overall this album was good, the continuity of sound that Cigarettes After Sex displays does prevent me from loving this album too much. The songs blend together and even into other albums the group produced years ago. While bands don’t need to have drastic directional and tonal shifts in each album, I think that a slight shift in sound indicates growth for a musician and gives intrigue to their discography. “X” is a great album to listen to when you are in your feels after a breakup, but besides that, not much else.
