NEW YORK, NY.- In 2016, after a 4-year-old track by a struggling Brooklyn band called Cigarettes After Sex blew up on YouTube, the group’s brand of crisp, lovesick minimalism began selling out clubs all over Europe. At a tour stop in Prague, Greg Gonzalez, its leader, saw unticketed fans weeping in the street.

“OK, this is bizarre,” Gonzalez remembered thinking. “But that showed me that this is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is music that’s meant for emotional people that are in love. That’s what music did for me. So I thought, that’s what I want my music to do for somebody else.”

Eight years later, that pattern has repeated for Cigarettes After Sex, on a far grander scale. Although largely ignored by the mainstream media, the band’s spare, crystalline ballads have again caught fire online — this time on TikTok — racking up almost 10 billion streams around the world. Its third album, “X’s,” will be released Friday via indie label Partisan, and an exhaustive global tour includes sold-out stops at Madison Square Garden as well as the Kia Forum near Los Angeles, and arenas throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia. By stealth, Cigarettes After Sex has become one of the biggest cult bands in the world.

Its success is also a high-water mark in rock’s latest retro revival, for shoegaze and dream-pop — appropriately nebulous terms for a range of music from the 1980s and early ’90s, when groups such as My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and Lush cloaked melodies in waves of shimmering guitar or synthesizers, along a sonic scale from gauzy reverie to caustic noise. Long a recurrent strain in indie pop, the sound has been catapulted by TikTok to a new level of popularity among Gen Z acts including Wisp, Sign Crushes Motorist and Quannnic that are posting millions of streams and dotting festival lineups.

Cigarettes After Sex represents one end of this spectrum, with a carefully calibrated, almost cinematic approach: a hushed, dark landscape punctuated by splashes of color from Gonzalez’s guitar, topped by his whisper-soft, almost feminine singing voice. But in an interview in a lower Manhattan hotel bar, Gonzalez — who in person speaks in an easy, rapid-fire baritone — said he sees Cigarettes After Sex as fitting more in a tradition of classic, moody love songs, referencing Marvin Gaye, Françoise Hardy and Al Green.

“It’s not about ‘let’s create this atmosphere,’ and that’s all,” said Gonzalez, 41, whose black Ray-Bans never left his face. “The Cocteau Twins, you could argue, is more that kind of thing,” he added, referring to the foundational Scottish dream-pop trio whose lyrics were often a jumble of fantastical verbiage. “What if you could do that and also had lyrics you could relate to more?”

Those lyrics can be strikingly raunchy, but with a verisimilitude that Gonzalez said is often straight autobiography.

The band’s origins go back to Gonzalez’s days at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2008, where, he said, his early songwriting efforts, inspired by the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain, were reverb-drenched and overstuffed. Gonzalez’s approach changed when he encountered “The Trinity Session,” the Cowboy Junkies’ hear-a-pin-drop 1988 album that was recorded around a single microphone.

To capture that same intimacy, Gonzalez set up his band in the echoey stairwell of the college music building and recorded its performances live. It was a eureka moment: “I finally found some kind of identity that feels special.”

Gonzalez moved to New York and self-released four songs from those sessions as an EP called “I.” Its black-and-white cover photo by Man Ray, of human anatomy turned surreal landscape, established a stark yet erotic visual identity that Gonzalez has stuck with ever since. (He later moved to Los Angeles.)

But Cigarettes After Sex had little success until a cut from that EP, “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby,” began garnering millions of views on YouTube after it was promoted to some of the site’s European users. Gonzalez, who had no label or manager at the time, began fielding thousands of curious emails.

Pouncing on the momentum, the group went on tour and signed with Partisan, and its self-titled debut album arrived in 2017. One weightless track from it, “Apocalypse,” caught the ear of a SiriusXM programmer, Chris Muckley, who put it into rotation.

“It took all the best things I liked about the xx, Mazzy Star and the Jesus and Mary Chain,” Muckley recalled. “It’s an aural sedative.”

That was nothing compared to the boost Cigarettes After Sex got during the pandemic. Its songs became the soundtrack to hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos, when young users added lilting snippets of “Apocalypse,” “K.” or “Cry” to extreme close-ups of their faces, in bliss or in tears. “Apocalypse” alone has since cleared 2 billion streams, according to Partisan.

“X’s” tweaks the formula only a bit to achieve what might be called Cigarettes After Sex’s version of dance-floor bangers. That means slightly more elevated tempos, with grooves that were composed over drum loops. On past albums Jacob Tomsky had played a stripped-down drum kit, with a sonic wash from a single ride cymbal; on “X’s,” he plays a more danceable hi-hat instead. (The band also includes Randall Miller on bass, with Jeff Kite contributing keyboards.) But from the threesome described in the title track, the thematic continuity is clear.

Rare among indie rockers, Gonzalez is also unapologetic about commercial ambitions. “When you write, you want to aspire to be among the greatest, and you want to stand on the shoulders of the giants that got you there,” he said. “So you want to be the biggest because you respect those artists that were the biggest as well, right?”

While Cigarettes After Sex was building a fan base, a noisier brand of neo-shoegaze music was taking hold on TikTok, abetted by YouTube tutorials offering step-by-step instructions for mimicking the fuzzy guitar effects that gave the original stuff its distinctive sound.

Last year, an 18-year-old computer science student at San Francisco State University named Natalie Lu began tinkering with a ready-made backing track she found on YouTube, recording her voice through her AirPods. The result, “Your Face,” was a vortex of serrated guitars and ethereal vocals about unrequited love set to a lunging, wave-tossed beat.

Lu posted the track to TikTok under the name Wisp, and by the next morning it had gotten over 100,000 views. Within a few days it crossed 500,000, and soon Lu was fielding calls from trend-chasing record companies. Before Wisp had played a single concert, Lu signed with Interscope Records, the major label behind stars like Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey. Next month Wisp — now a full band — is playing Lollapalooza in Chicago.

“It was a complete shock to me,” Lu, now 19, said in a video interview from her new home in Los Angeles, where she sported a pink-purple dye job recalling vintage Lush. “But I’m happy that people on that platform enjoy it, and I think TikTok is a really good app to use, to just market your music and make connections.”

What gets called shoegaze now is a shaggy agglomeration of indie-rock that may feature bits of shimmering feedback or any number of ’90s influences. Quannnic, another solo project, can conjure Radiohead’s infatuation with dehumanized electronics. Wednesday could be heirs of Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. Boston band Horse Jumper of Love, with slow, ragged grooves, are more lo-fi rock than anything.

“Shoegaze used to mean one thing, which was a giant pedal board,” said Will Anderson, whose bands Hotline TNT and Weed also get the tag, though they could just as accurately be described as grunge descendants. “It inches a little wider every year. That’s like anything else — pop or indie or punk.”

Phil Pirrone, co-founder of the Desert Daze festival in Lake Perris, California, which has hosted reunion performances by OG shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, said the revival built gradually but now seems to be everywhere. Desert Daze’s next event, in October, will feature Wisp and what he said were an array of other neo-shoegaze groups.

“We are living in a maximalist future in which every era is being romanticized by some demographic of people,” Pirrone said. Shoegaze, he said, “as dreamy as it is, it’s also dangerous, fatalistic. There’s something romantic about that in this day and age.”

It also represents a shift in the effects of streaming media. Half a generation ago, the playlist economy was pushing producers in a pop direction, rewarding tracks that front-loaded their hooks. Shoegaze and dream-pop, on the other hand, take time to cast their spell — though in the era of TikTok, even the most cinematic expanse still gets compressed into a few bars of sonic wallpaper.

When the term shoegaze was first used in the British music press in the late 1980s, it was a lightly mocking insult aimed at a clutch of bands that appeared diffident onstage because their members tended to hang their heads downward — as they stared at their guitar effects pedals.

“We were consciously wanting to get away from the Simple Minds, U2, big-star-onstage thing,” Andy Bell of Ride said in an interview. “I think a lot of shoegaze came from the fact that we were trying to be humble, to let the music speak, create a really huge wall of noise and let that be the sound.” Since the band reunited in 2014, Bell said, he has noticed its live crowds getting younger and younger.

Miki Berenyi of Lush recalled that by 1991, when her band toured with Ride, the winking humor of the term had evaporated once American journalists began applying it wholesale. “It’s interesting,” Berenyi said, “how the irony or the sarcasm was lost in this shift over to America.”

In Britain, the original shoegaze wave died with the rise of Britpop in the mid-’90s; in the United States, if it took hold at all, it was blasted away by grunge. But the sound never completely vanished, and it got new attention after My Bloody Valentine reunited in 2008. Groups like DIIV and Beach House — whose hypnotic 2015 track “Space Song” has crossed 1 billion streams on Spotify — absorbed the influence of shoegaze and dream-pop, setting up the next generation.

Despite Cigarettes After Sex’s popularity on TikTok, the key to its success may be old-fashioned touring. The band has crisscrossed the globe multiple times, building up loyal — and notably young — fan bases in Poland, India, Indonesia, South America; the United States has only recently caught up as to the rest of the world as one of its top live markets. For some tours in Asia and the Middle East, where public standards may be less liberal, the band is advertised only under the name CAS.

And while Cigarettes After Sex’s slow-motion soundscapes can recall classic dream-pop or the soundtrack to “Twin Peaks,” to Gonzalez, the only thing old-fashioned about Cigarettes After Sex is its insistence on romantic songwriting.

“I just thought it’d be nice to have someone who pretty much only does love songs,” he said. “You’re not really going to go wrong in that department.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.