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Greg Gonzalez writes songs like intimate diary entries: explicit, erotic and nakedly autobiographical. That was all well and good when he started out in 2008, before anyone was really listening, but in 2016, his band Cigarettes After Sex became an overnight internet sensation eight years in the making. It was in January of that year that his song "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby", which had been released to little fanfare four years earlier, went belatedly and unexpectedly viral.
It has now been played 95 million times on YouTube alone, helping the band's 2017 self-titled debut album find an audience eager for its gauzy, hypnagogic melancholy and X-rated lyrics. The question is, does this success mean that now every potential romantic partner expects to be memorialised in song? Frankly, I tell Gonzalez when we meet in the Mayfair Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, I'd be a little offended if I hooked up with him and he failed to christen me with a moniker as pornographically succinct as: "the patron saint of sucking c**k".
Gonzalez, dressed in black jeans and a black leather jacket in what seems like a deliberate affront to the Californian heat outside, laughs and peers at me over the top of his black Ray-Bans.
"Yeah, I feel like I hear that question a lot," he says. "They'll say: 'So, what's our song gonna be?' It almost kills the magic if someone asks that. I go: 'Well, it's probably never going to happen now…'" It all started with that name. While still a fledgling musician in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez made the decision to call his band Cigarettes After Sex well before he knew what they would sound like. It...