Cigarettes after Sex, an ambient dream pop band from El Paso, Texas, is playing a show with headliner Garbage, at San Francisco’s Masonic this Saturday, September 24th.

In comparison to their concert counterpart, Garbage, whose grungy alt-rock sound has been around since the ’90s, Cigarettes after Sex is fairly new; the band just released their first EP in 2012. Both their previously released EP I. (2012), and LP, Affection (2015), make up a compilation of hazy, dream-like ballads that convey heavy-hearted sentiment through Greg Gonzalez’s floating, soft-spoken vocals, echoing guitar, and smooth bass lines grounding the music in a celestial cloud of noise. Cigarettes is in the midst of a long string of tour dates, having just finished the first half of their European tour. They’ll continue with their U.S. tour dates with two shows in Chicago and New York, opening for indie-downtempo band Rhye.

Garbage is on tour promoting their newest album, Strange Little Birds (2016) — the sixth of their discography. Shirley Manson, lead singer of the band, mentioned in an interview with EW that this new record is dark, in both mood and content, in order to reflect the current state of the world. Their motivation, she describes, was driven by their want to “focus on feelings and atmosphere–things [they felt were] being forgotten about in music.” She also added that while the new album does have similarities to their very first album in terms of mood, they try their best to stay true to the times they — and we — are living in.

Tickets for the show on Saturday can be found here.

Article by Vivian Chen

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