The ICC Theatre hums with an anticipatory quiet, a restless, murmuring kind of hush that only happens before a show like this. Cigarettes After Sex don’t do loud, but they do something even more potent—an all-consuming softness, the kind that fills a room and leaves no space for anything else.
For a band with billions of streams and a digital footprint so vast it barely seems real, Cigarettes After Sex remain elusive, almost unreal. Greg Gonzalez writes music that feels like a whisper in your ear, songs that belong to late-night car rides and bedsheets, to memory as much as to the moment. X’s, their latest release, arrived in July last year with no grand reveal, just a gentle, inevitable drift into existence—like the band itself, which formed in El Paso, Texas, in 2008, and then took nearly a decade to reach the wider world.
There is something deeply personal, almost conspiratorial, about their music. You don’t just hear Apocalypse or Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby—you remember where you were the first time you heard them. In 2023, they sold over 200,000 tickets worldwide, without even being in an album cycle. Their music has been used 6.4 billion times on TikTok, yet Gonzalez barely seems to exist in that world. He and the band stay in the shadows, letting the music take its own shape, spreading like an intimate secret.
The Sydney ICC Theatre is at capacity, a sea of bodies swaying in collective anticipation. The crowd skews young—early twenties, mostly women, draped in black. It’s the kind of turnout you’d expect at a Chappell Roan show, maybe a Billie Eilish gig, but instead of hyperpop synths or whispery melancholia, the pre-show soundtrack is a time warp: OMD’s shimmering synths, Chris Isaak’s reverb-soaked heartbreak, Sheryl Crow’s ’90s radio staple crooning through the speakers. A peculiar choice, but the audience hums along, waiting.
The stage is a shadowbox, veiled in a sheer curtain that billows slightly, resembling a mosquito net or a scrim in a dream sequence. When the band takes the stage, the reaction is immediate—a wall of screams, sharp and high-pitched, the kind usually reserved for arena pop idols. It’s unexpected, this Beatlemania-level fervour for a group that thrives in the realm of moody synthscapes and cavernous reverb.
Positioning is deliberate: Gonzalez dead center, a dark silhouette against the glow. To his right, Jacob Tomsky is locked in behind the drums, steady, controlled. To the left, Randall Miller—cool incarnate—slings his bass with the effortless detachment of someone who knows the power of restraint. They are spaced apart, as if each member is occupying their own world within the same orbit.
The night begins.
Cigarettes After Sex move to Brisbane next, tickets HERE.
