Cigarettes After Sex is the kind of band that makes music so intimate it makes you want to selfishly tuck it away in the quietest corner of your heart. It’s something you wouldn’t lend out carelessly—not to friends, not to your cousin, not even to your sister. At least, that’s how it felt when I first stumbled upon Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby back when I was an overly serious teenager who thought listening to a band called “Cigarettes After Sex” made me seem more interesting; compensating for the fact that I had never so much as held a girl’s hand. 

Years have passed since, and the band has become something of a phenomenon—amassing billions of streams and selling out shows worldwide across various continents. They belong to the world now. So, when the opportunity to watch them perform live at the Singapore Indoor Stadium presented itself, I jumped at it. Mainly involving a series of anxious texts to my editor-in-chief to secure the tickets (thanks for letting me have this one, big dawg). 

Cigarettes After Sex is a band drenched in black—from their wardrobe to their album art, and even the mood of their music. It felt natural, then, to attend the concert clad in black and grey, as if merging with the aesthetic would somehow enhance the experience. I had known this “unspoken” dress code to be a TikTok trend beforehand, but actually seeing it in person and witnessing the sea of black fabric before my eyes felt oddly unifying. Dare I say, almost cult-like…? But more on that later. 

@pooopiedooo ♬ original sound - Rancies Bangcuyo Almirante

The concert began in near darkness

The lights dimmed, leaving the stadium illuminated only by the constellated glow of mobile phones and the spotlights on stage, which beckoned the band to appear. Radio silence. The moment was as quiet as the stadium would be all evening. A slow inhale before the first note. Then, the soft hum of an electric guitar, provoking the crowd to exhale in a rapturous cry. That was, until, the coaxing voice of Greg Gonzalez took over. 

“Do it with the lips that you kept when I finally kissed you.” 

The stadium was pacified, and it fell back into silence. The band opened with X’s. which started a little shaky. Gonzalez spent the first half of the song finding his footing with the tempo of the instruments and the echo of the microphone. But when everything smoothed out, and the music finally settled, the sounds that invaded my ears swirled like velvet satin. Those smoky, ambient sounds of melancholia, intensified by Gonzalez’s androgynous voice, put me right in a daze. 

It’s difficult to recall specific moments, the way you sometimes struggle to separate one dream from another. The songs blurred together, not in a way that diminished them, but in the way time softens the edges of a memory. The stage production only sank me deeper into this state. Shifting greyscale visuals of majestic clouds and heavy thunderstorms decorated the main screen. A grainy shot of Jacob Tomsky banging on the drums. A sublime angle of Randall Miller’s silhouette playing the bass, captured in a shot you’d expect to see in an Ingmar Bergman film. You pair all that with the shadowy reverb of an electric guitar filling the space, and for a while, it felt like we were all floating in some kind of collective dream. 

Yet, as I drifted through the haze of smoke and mist, there were moments when the air cleared, and specific scenes stood out. A flash from the pit below revealed a couple taking a picture of themselves as Sweet played in the background. The palpable excitement of friends contrasted with the pensive presence of those who attended the show alone. A couple holding back on physical shows of affection until the very end, as the show began slipping away. 

Gonzalez once described his music as “erotic lullabies”, which gives the optics of his soothing voice pacifying the crowd a whole new perspective. Just as I used to roll around in my room as an adolescent, playing their music to feel my emotions on a deeper level—it struck me how (almost) everyone in attendance probably did the same at some point, using their music as a form of reassurance and anxiety relief. 

Every person—thousands of us, strangers, at various stages of life, were in that stadium. And we were all, in some capacity, thinking about love. The heated throes of budding love exemplified by the words, “I always will make it feel like you were the last one.” The ache of unrequited love in “He’s got so much in his heart / But he doesn’t know what to do.” The soft, guttural memory of a lost love reflected in “And when you go away, I still see you / With sunlight on your face in my rearview.” Cigarettes After Sex’s ability to distil the multitudes of love, longing, and lust into contemplative lyrics, smouldering guitar strums, and light snares is widely known. But to experience it in such a tangible manner was something special. 

The band performed many favourites, including Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby, Apocalypse, and Cry. All of it felt even better live, as the simmering ambience of the lighting and smoke made it feel as though we were inside Gonzalez’s head, just as he envisioned these songs. By the time Dreaming of You rolled around, I was entranced. Falling in Love pulled me under. 

Then came the moment when the spotlights descended upon the crowd. I don’t recall which song was playing, but I remember the light—blinding and all-consuming. For a brief moment, everything disappeared, and it was just me and that light. Pure and overwhelming. A kind voice serenading my ears. 

The emotional high, the unspoken black dress code upheld by a sea of thousands, a charismatic frontman bathed in a spotlight, the collective chanting of lyrics—it all felt like some kind of cultic ritual in a moment outside of time. Before the concert, I’d joked about being prepared for a transcendental, spiritual experience, and while I didn’t quite get there, those damned spotlights came pretty close.