How to sound like Cigarettes After Sex
The whole thing is slow tempos and reverb on everything, played soft and mixed close. Put a clean chorusy guitar into Adrift with more Melt than Heat, keep it quiet, and drench the vocal in reverb.
I get asked about this sound a lot, usually late at night from someone who just found the band and wants to know why it feels the way it does. The honest answer is that it is mostly restraint. There is not a lot happening in these songs, and the parts that are happening are drowned in reverb and played slower than most people are comfortable playing. Here is how I think about building it in the box.
A short history of the Cigarettes After Sex sound
Cigarettes After Sex is the project of Greg Gonzalez, who started it in El Paso, Texas around 2008. The public story is that the sound found itself partly by accident in a reverberant stairwell, and you can hear that in everything that came after. The whole aesthetic is hazy and black and white, ambient pop that feels more like a mood than a set of songs. The self titled album from 2017 is the one most people know, and "Cry" came a couple of years later in the same lane.
Two things define it more than anything else. First, the tempos are slow, often slower than feels natural when you sit down to play. Second, the vocals are whispered and androgynous, close to the mic and almost conversational. Greg has talked publicly about how people sometimes assume the singer is a woman on first listen, and that ambiguity is part of the appeal. Nothing pushes at you. It all hangs in the air.
The players and their gear
I want to be careful here, because I have not been in the room with this band and I am not going to pretend I know the exact pedals and amps. What I can describe is what the recordings sound like and what it takes to get there, and you can trust your ears from that.
The guitars are clean and soaked in reverb, with a gentle chorus that adds a slow shimmer and a soft delay that smears the notes together. Nobody is digging in. The picking is light and even. The drums, when they are there, are brushed or at least very restrained, more of a pulse than a beat. The bass is simple and round, mostly holding down root notes so the harmony has a floor. Over all of it sits a big, lush reverb that glues everything into one wash.
Then there is the vocal, which is the whole point. It is close and breathy, recorded right up on the mic so you get the intimacy, and then it is drenched in reverb too. The trick that makes it work is that the vocal is mixed forward but stays soft. It is loud in the balance and quiet in energy at the same time. That combination is what gives you the pillow talk feeling.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The Cigarettes After Sex chain, in the box
- Start with a clean, chorusy guitar. Roll off any dirt, add a slow, gentle chorus for movement, and pick lightly with even dynamics. You want a soft, glassy tone before any reverb touches it.
- Set Adrift gently. Put it on the guitar and lean on Melt for the wash, with only a little Heat. This is the reverb haze, not a fuzz wall. Let the tails bloom and blur the note edges together.
- Keep it slow and quiet, then drown the vocal. Hold the tempo down, keep every part restrained, and send the whispered vocal into a long, lush reverb so it floats forward while staying soft.
Adrift builds the wall in one plugin
It puts the reverb before the fuzz for you, so the wash blooms instead of sitting behind the note, and it drowns the pick attack automatically. Heat sets how hard the reverb feeds the saturation, Melt sets how far the whole thing dissolves. Load it on a clean guitar, roll them up, and you are inside the wall in about ten seconds. Mac, Windows and Linux, offline license.
Get Adrift · $39 →For this sound specifically, I keep Heat low. Cigarettes After Sex is not a fuzz band. The saturation on Adrift is doing something subtle here, just warming the reverb tails so they do not sound sterile, while Melt does the heavy lifting by letting the wash spread out and soften. If you have used it for heavier shoegaze before, this is the same plugin turned way down. Think of it as a haze machine rather than a wall of noise. If you want the louder version of this idea, I wrote about that over in the Slowdive guide, where the fuzz gets to come forward.
Dialing it in
- Play slower than feels right. Whatever tempo you land on, try knocking it down a few more beats per minute. This music lives in the space between notes, and that space needs room to breathe.
- Keep it soft. Light picking, quiet playing, gentle dynamics. If you are digging in, you are already off the mark. The intimacy comes from restraint, not effort.
- Treat the reverb as the instrument. The wash is not a garnish on top of the part. It is a part of its own. Let it be loud enough that the dry signal almost disappears into it.
- Mix the vocal forward but soft. Close mic it, keep the delivery breathy, and let the reverb sit it in the room without pushing the level down. Forward and gentle at once.
None of this is complicated, which is sort of the lesson. The hardest part is trusting that so little can carry a whole song. Set the guitar clean and chorusy, let Adrift do the haze, keep the tempo down and the hand soft, and put the vocal close and wet. Do that and you are already most of the way there.