Cigarettes After Intercourse have by no means shied away from exploring the messier corners of intimacy. “Anna Karenina,” their first launch since 2024’s X’s, finds Greg Gonzalez in genuinely uncomfortable territory.
The band issued the observe as a part of a double single alongside a canopy of The Doorways’ “The Crystal Ship.”
Relatively than the fully-sung melodies which have outlined their work from “Apocalypse” by way of to X’s, “Anna Karenina” builds itself round prolonged spoken-word passages.
Gonzalez’s voice stays as hushed and intimate as ever. Stripped of melody, his supply takes on an unsettling directness.
The impact is much less like overhearing pillow speak and extra like being trapped inside somebody’s spiral of guilt and obsession.
Hazy guitar work shimmers in peripheral imaginative and prescient. A laid-back drum groove barely registers above a heartbeat. Tambourine accents catch the sunshine like mud motes. These acquainted textures body one thing darker brewing beneath.
Anna Karenina throws herself beneath a practice after her affair with Rely Vronsky collapses into jealousy and social isolation. This tragic finish anchors the tune emotionally.
The refrain, the place Gonzalez lastly sings fairly than speaks, makes use of this picture as each metaphor and mirror. Witnessing Anna’s suicide turns into a mirrored image level for Gonzalez’s personal entrapment.
How little Gonzalez explains makes this work. The spoken verses catalogue omissions and secrets and techniques, all of the issues left unsaid in a relationship already drowning in phrases.
“I by no means informed you the place I used to be going / I by no means informed you what I used to be doing / I by no means informed you any of my secrets and techniques, actually.”
The repetition builds not in direction of catharsis however in direction of claustrophobia. Gonzalez isn’t searching for forgiveness. He’s documenting his personal complicity in a mutual destruction.
The second spoken part shifts from omission to commentary, describing a second of bodily intimacy: “Laughing as you are taking your shirt off / And you are taking your skirt off / And also you bounce / Into the swimming pool.”
What ought to really feel liberating reads as haunted. Gonzalez claims “the world is on hearth” as they embrace. Not ardour. Apocalypse. A consuming drive neither social gathering can management.
Cigarettes After Intercourse have all the time dealt in longing and melancholy, sometimes inside a gauzy, romanticised body. “Anna Karenina” strips that away. The tune explicitly frames the love as “deep and painful.”
The repeated insistence that “I’ll by no means get free / I’ll by no means be free” turns what may need been tragic romance into mutual imprisonment.
Listeners who come to Cigarettes After Intercourse for the hovering, reverb-drenched vocals that made “Ok.” and “Sunsetz” indie staples could discover the spoken-word sections jarring.
There’s no straightforward entry level right here, no hook to hold you thru. The melodic refrain gives transient respite. Gonzalez cuts it quick each occasions, refusing to let the tune settle into standard construction.
The band haven’t deserted what they do greatest. Temper. Ambiance. The instruments stay the identical. The aim has modified.
If earlier work invited you to lose your self within the dream, “Anna Karenina” forces you to remain current for the nightmare.
“Anna Karenina” received’t supplant the band’s most beloved tracks in fan affection, nor ought to it. It’s uncomfortable.
The tune resists the straightforward pleasures which have outlined a lot of their catalogue. It does counsel a band unafraid to mature in actual time, to let their emotional palette darken and their experiments develop bolder.
Paired with their cowl of “The Crystal Ship,” a tune Jim Morrison wrote about his personal doomed love affair, the double single presents Cigarettes After Intercourse at their most literarily formidable.
Whether or not this marks a brand new route or stays a one-off experiment, time will inform. It stands as one in all their most placing achievements.
