Cigarettes After Sex - 'Twizzler'
If longing had a flavour, it'd be watermelon and heartbreak and Cigarettes After Sex know exactly how to serve it.
Nobody does slow-burn yearning quite like Cigarettes After Sex. Greg Gonzalez has spent the better part of a decade building a world so specific and so atmospheric that stepping into a new song feels less like pressing play and more like being handed someone's old photograph. You don't know whose it is. You feel it anyway. Their latest single via Partisan Records arrives quietly, the way all their best songs do, and settles somewhere behind your sternum before you've even realised it's moved in.
The title is a deliberate provocation. "Twizzler." There is something almost comedic about it sitting alongside "Apocalypse" and "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby," but Gonzalez has always trusted the small and the mundane to carry enormous emotional weight. The candy becomes a sensory anchor dropped into a scene of summer heat, open-air cinema, and a promise made in light that makes everything feel eternal. It's so specific it almost hurts.
"Kiss so hot / Lips to a Twizzler in the summer sun / Outside in the Cinerama Dome, you swore I'd be the only one..."
As a musician, I've sat with their records trying to figure out exactly where the feeling lives. It's the guitar tone, soaked in something warm and left to dry in late afternoon light. It's Jacob Tomsky's drums, which feel more like a slow exhale than a rhythm section. It's Randall Miller's bass anchoring everything like a hand on your shoulder. And it's Gonzalez's voice at the centre, never straining, never performing, just telling you something true at a volume that asks you to lean in.
The chorus gives you six words repeated until they stop being words entirely. "I love the way you made me feel / And I don't care why." The "I don't care why" is the key. It's not apathy. It's surrender. Gonzalez doesn't try to explain the emotion or anatomise it. He just hands it to you whole and trusts you to hold it carefully.
This new single is not trying to be a statement. It arrives while the band are selling out arenas across three continents and racking up streaming figures that place them in the company of Fleetwood Mac and Queen, and yet it sounds like it was made in a quiet room by people with nothing to prove. A song about a night that mattered, written by someone who still feels it. That restraint is its own kind of confidence. Not every band that fills the O2 still knows how to whisper. Cigarettes After Sex have never forgotten.
The song is Cigarettes After Sex doing what they do better than almost anyone else alive. It is unhurried and precise and quietly devastating. A song built from specific memories that somehow becomes everybody's. Put it on somewhere you can actually listen. It deserves that much.
Words by Dhriti Duggal
