The Birth of Dream Pop Out of the Spirit of Music
On Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House
Every day, the TikTok “For You” page displays in rapid-fire formation the horrors of our contemporary world. (Something about TikTok - whether it be its community atmosphere, the thrill of 15 minutes of fame, or the intoxicating allure of being part of a trend - clearly compels users to share their most embarrassing and bizarre stories). I came across one such horror recently: a girl divulging how she and her best friend used to share a bed with a man, “taking turns being cuddled by him while listening to [Cigarettes After Sex] and Beach House.”
Much can be said of this arrangement. (Then again, far stranger romantic and sexual arrangements are routinely shared on TikTok). What I find compelling about it is the musical component.
This particular combination of artists — Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House — is notable, because their music appeals so viscerally to hopeless romantics and sensitive youth.
These two bands share many similarities. They have been active for over a decade. They have had cult followings since their inception, but have experienced more widespread interest since their songs began trending on TikTok in 2020. Their lead singers (Greg Gonzalez and Victoria Legrand, respectively) are elder millennials with hushed, androgynous voices.
And they are the quintessential dream pop artists.
“Dream pop” loosely refers to music with romantic lyrics, heavy reverb, and psychedelic-influenced qualities. It’s one of those genres that you know when you hear it.
Its musical roots descend from a 1990s form of alternative rock reliant upon heavy distortion, called shoegaze (named after the way guitarists gazed downward at their effects pedals). Dream pop borrows shoegaze’s use of distortion, though in a manner that is softer and more digestible.
Usually I lament the distillation of a raw artistic form into a more digestible format, but with dream pop, it just works. And in the cases of Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House, it works particularly well. Without the deluge of noise typical of shoegaze, space is opened up in dream pop for the listener to connect with the vocalist.
With both Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House, the music is evocative, ethereal, and symbolic. Lyrically, it is rarely story-driven and sometimes barely coherent — just like a dream.
Both groups exemplify nominative determinism in music: their names reflect the vivid experiences evoked by their work. Cigarettes After Sex music is reminiscent of the intimate feelings of, well, cigarettes after sex. Beach House music is reminiscent of nostalgia and escapism, and an archetypal object of nostalgic and escapist fantasy is the beach house.
In an age in which art and music is rife with ironic detachment, artificial angst, and goofy hedonism (ex: mumble rap, self-referential TikTok-friendly breakup anthems like “ABCDEFU,” and the exaggerated, vulgar songs of Ice Spice and Megan Thee Stallion), dream pop aims toward authentic and earnest expressions of wistfulness.
The music of Cigarettes After Sex relies upon a booming bass, which usually appears about 10 seconds into each song. It penetrates the chest and leaves the listener porous, making the band’s delicate synths, guitar, and vocals all the more effective.
Their songs are tinged with melancholy. The band is keenly aware that love is a double-edged sword, in which pleasure is inextricably tied to destruction.
The band’s name once again provides insight into their musical themes. Cigarettes and sex both embody the human drive toward death and annihilation of the self. In the sexual act, one gives oneself over to another until la petite mort (“the little death,” or climax). In the act of smoking, one ritualistically suspends fresh air for a fleeting and deadly intake of toxins. Love, like sex (and cigarettes), is a morbid and futile fascination. Sooner or later, someone always leaves or dies.
In the lyrics of Cigarettes After Sex, this bittersweet view of love is elucidated. Love is cutting (“All of my love for you, cuts me like barbed wire”). Love is like an apocalypse (“Your lips, my lips, Apocalypse”). Love is haunting (“Come out and haunt me, I know you want me”). Love triggers mania and the desire to totally possess the beloved — a forbidden desire in an era of feminism and contractual relationships (“Think I like you best when you're dressed in black from head to toe, Think I like you best when you're just with me and no one else”).
The one thing love is not in the work of Cigarettes After Sex, is simply pleasant.
The descriptions of love in the music of Beach House are not as uniformly melancholic. And unlike Cigarettes After Sex, Beach House does not explicitly use the word “love” very often in their songs. They instead prefer to set the scene.
Beach House’s Legrand doesn’t explicitly describe how her love is destructive. She instead sings “The first thing that I do before I get into your house - I'm gonna tear off all the petals from the rose that's in your mouth.” To show how she finds love overwhelming, she sings “The heart is full and now it’s spilling.” To show her lover that they belong together, she sings, “In this harbor of a room, You'll find your anchor soon.”
An even bigger difference between the two artists is that while Cigarettes After Sex songs all concern romance, Beach House songs are more generally about the beauty and mystery of life (of which romance is one part).
In their more stoner-ish tunes, Beach House marvels at the stars and natural beauty. Legrand sings “Dark red light-years brought near, Cold gone glowing night sing… I want to lie in they call Orion, The colors missing upon the dark spring.”
Even more often, Beach House lyrics are totally vague. In their songs “Days of Candy” and “Irene,” Legrand sings “I know it comes too soon, The universe is riding off with you,” and “It’s a strange paradise.” What exactly is the it she sings of? Love? Loss? Life? It’s unclear, but whatever it is feels profound, thanks to Legrand’s expressive vocals.
Beach House is known for its thick and lush musical arrangements, replete with soaring synths and muffled, heartbeat-like drums. They embrace musical techniques commonly used in 1960s and 70s rock, without acting as a pastiche of that era. They often use hypnotic electric guitar interludes that repeat for minutes (like in the final half of “PPP”), as well as fade-outs.
The fade-out (found in Beach House’s “Space Song,” “Walk in the Park,” “Take Care,” and many more of their songs) is particularly underutilized in contemporary music. When a song fades away rather than terminating on a predictable beat, the listener feels — for a moment— as if they are carried away along an infinite musical stream. Even after a song ends, the fade-out has a way of leaving it with the listener. The incompleteness of the song is paradoxically what completes it.
A common claim (and complaint) made about Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House is that all of their music sounds the same, and that two songs can barely be told apart.
As a dedicated listener, this claim rings hollow, especially about Beach House. (The adolescent vigor of Beach House’s “Dark Spring” is totally different from the somberness of “Space Song,” which is totally different from “Through Me,” “Black Car,” et cetera, et cetera).
Certainly, Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House each have a signature style. Yet, this is a sign of authentic artistry. Far from detracting from their work, I find it remarkable how each song by Cigarettes After Sex clearly belongs in the same universe yet is still so unique.
The maintenance of a consistent style is far more endearing than the contrived and jarring style-shifts of 21st century mass-market pop, such as Nicki Minaj’s dubious attempts to sing heartfelt ballads after years of exuberant and decadent rapping, or Taylor Swift’s constant genre-hopping, which she neatly confines into an array of “eras” for use as a marketing tool.
As I have noted before, Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House have both trended heavily on TikTok. This may appear bizarre, as their music may seem too heartfelt for an app so trivial and juvenile. Yet, they actually fit right in.
TikTok has elicited criticism for encouraging users to abandon full stories in favor of quick emotional and aesthetic appeals. Yet, emotional and aesthetic appeals are precisely what music is about, especially dream pop. TikTok may be degrading to storytelling, but it is a legitimate medium for more intuitive forms of artistry. After all, the beauty of music is that it has the power to immediately touch the soul in a way that transcends rational explanation.
I am in full agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche that story is secondary and supplemental to music. Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music:
Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena.
The tension and release embedded within the sound waves of a well-composed piece strike the soul more quickly and deeply than lyrics alone ever can.
As the 2010s descend further into the dustbin of history, we should recognize that the greatest artists of this period are not necessarily the most commercially-successful ones. Rather, they are those with the deepest and most-lasting impact on listeners. The music that deserves a place in the American songbook is not that which best suits Old Navy commercials or meaningless gyrations in nightclubs, but that which best opens people’s hearts and touches their souls. And judging from the way that people pour their hearts out in TikTok comment sections, the music of Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House seems to do just that.
Cigarettes After Texas
A short, related, side story:
I was in Texas last week, when Cigarettes After Sex was performing on the final night of the Austin City Limits music festival. The festival tickets were too expensive, so — inspired by a Reddit post — I walked along the nature trail behind Austin’s Zilker Park with the goal of catching glimpses of the show.
To my disappointment, the trail was much emptier, darker, and more distant from the music than I expected it to be. As I continued walking along, following the music, lampposts became fewer and farther between, and my unease grew.
A few minutes in, I felt relieved to pass a couple. We briefly chatted. I told them about my plan to hear Cigarettes After Sex for free from the trail, and my concern about the darkness ahead. They were sorry to tell me that the whole path ahead was entirely unlit, but encouraged me to continue on my quest regardless. They then noted that the city had a serial killer on the loose, before swiftly brushing that bit of information aside and assuring me: “You’re safe, it’s Austin.”
Despite my appreciation for risk and adventure, I was actually not willing to risk being shanked in the darkness behind a music festival, while the Austin police were preoccupied. I turned around and left the trail behind, only hearing faint traces of the band along the way.
Perhaps I heard Cigarettes After Sex in the most fitting way possible: faintly and in the distance, while alone and a bit melancholic.
Or maybe that’s just cope for the fact that I missed the concert.
Ngl mate, this reads far more like an indulgent reading of your own narrative surrounding these artists than any sort of critical assessment of them. And regarding Nietzsche - I gather that the reason language does not directly capture the emotional conveyance of music is because its function is fundamentally a different goal. Verbal language is intended to be discrete and clarifying in its communication, music is inherently expansive and ambivalent in its realization and expression (although when trained, a musician is also quite capable of being musically and emotionally discrete). The use of verbal language in music requires a deft knowledge of both poetry and sound to be aesthetically impressive.
Cheers to not getting jumped in Austin tho.