Philadelphia’s Cigarettes for Breakfast Prescribe Heartrending Shoegaze Panacea “Numb the Pain”

Loving something you shouldn’t is like clutching a live wire—painful, charged, and impossible to release. You know it’s wrong, yet it hums in your bones, an electric ache that won’t let up. It becomes a constant presence in the mind, a murmur at the edge of thought, a craving that burrows under your skin and festers. You bargain with yourself, feeding this dark affection morsels of your time, your sanity, hoping it’ll be enough to satisfy. But it never is. This kind of love grows roots in places it shouldn’t reach, tangling with your better judgment, throttling reason with its grip. It’s a vice that whispers sweetly, promising release, only to tighten the noose. In the end, you’re left holding onto a thing that gnaws at you, bleeding you dry while smiling back – because the worst part of all is that you still don’t want to let go.

Philadelphia’s Cigarettes for Breakfast stirs up shoegaze with a raw, bone-deep energy, wrapping dense layers of sound around each heart-torn lyric. Their songs bring forth the gauzy spirit of shoegaze giants like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, yet there’s something distinctly their own, a fresh, iridescent spark igniting the familiar dreamy haze. Every performance spills over with a kind of electric yearning—thick waves of reverb crashing against walls of fuzz, while lyrics drift like echoes, steeped in a relentless longing.

Numb the Pain, featuring guest vocals by Andi from Andi & Alex on the NBC series The Voice, is the third single from their upcoming album Slow Motion, slated for a February 2025 release. The track dives into existential dread, grappling with depression, addiction, and societal angst.

Drenched in sighing reverb, Numb The Pain mirrors a sense of disillusionment and defeat, a return to a familiar, troubled turf. The lyrics drip with indifference and frustration, conveying a sense of being buried or stuck, haunted by doubts of past failures. Themes of numbing pain and fleeing reality weave through, painting a bleak picture of isolation and solitary struggle.

Listen to Numb The Pain at the link below, or order here.

The brainchild of Matt Whiteford, with a rotating roster of members and collaborators, has grabbed listeners’ hearts, shifting from the DIY music scene to sharing stages with Slow Crush, The Asteroid No. 4, and Day Aches. After several EPs and singles, Cigarettes for Breakfast released a debut LP, Join the Circus in 2023, showcasing their knack for exploring love, loss, and self-discovery, taking listeners on a wild ride through raw emotions.

Slow Motion is set to be released in February of 2025.

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