It’s hard to sing along to a Dry Cleaning song—and the reasons go beyond the fact their lead singer, Florence Shaw, isn’t really one for singing. Few songwriters grant you such open access to the inner workings of their mind as Shaw, whose free-ranging soliloquies can ping-pong between quotidian mundanity, social critique, and dadaist farce in a single verse, all while she maintains the calm elocution of a wellness podcast host. When the music feels a bit like discovering someone’s cache of private “note to self” recordings, trying to sing along would just feel invasive.
While Shaw’s deadpan delivery may seem like an inflexible instrument, it’s the anchor that allows her bandmates—guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton—to roam freely. Even as the gnarled guitar of their early EPs gave way to the jangly jaunts of 2022’s Stumpwork, the band could feel secure in the knowledge that any song featuring Shaw on vocals will sound like a Dry Cleaning song and nothing but. In a sense, their relationship is like that of a director and film-score composer, forging a parallel-play dynamic between spoken narrative and soundtrack. But on Secret Love, their first album in three and a half years, Dry Cleaning are operating in a more intuitive, integrated way, investing the songs with pronounced dramatic cues, properly sung choruses, and playful call-and-response. The band’s musical vision continues to expand, rendering even a catch-all term like “post-punk” insufficient to encompass their chameleonism.
With Secret Love, Dry Cleaning find a perfect game-recognize-game accomplice in Welsh indie auteur Cate Le Bon, who’s become not just an in-demand producer, but practically a subgenre unto herself, attracting like-minded practitioners of off-kilter, observational art-pop into her orbit. Throughout her personal and production discography, Le Bon displays a gift for transmuting frostiness into frisson, and she works a similar magic on Secret Love. Maybe life in the mid 2020s draws you to the panic-attack paranoia of Geese singing, “There’s a bomb in my car”; Dry Cleaning are more apt to direct fear inward. The album’s lead single, “Hit My Head All Day” (released in the same week last fall as Getting Killed) depicts the mind-numbing malaise of trudging through a world choking on rage-baiting disinformation as a slow-motion Scary Monsters-esque carousel of disjointed funk, Frippian fretboard strangulations, and goon-squad chants. And yet, two-thirds into the song’s six-minute lurch, a beaming synth line appears like a biblical burst of light, a plea for sanctuary from perpetual chaos.
When she’s not cataloging her self-harm-as-self-care rituals, Shaw uses her blasé-faire vocal tone as an avatar for the sorts of people who can more easily ignore the world’s indignities. Over the chirpy riff of “Cruise Ship Designer,” Shaw’s smug protagonist tries to convince us that building nautical playgrounds for the rich constitutes a noble artistic pursuit while he waits for the spoils of the 1 percent trickle down to him. (Maybe she’s also talking about musicians who sign away their creative freedoms and livelihoods to industry gatekeepers for an ever-shrinking piece of the pie.)
Then there’s the hypochondriac foodie of “Evil Evil Idiot,” obsessively cataloging their meal-prep techniques: “I like to burn my food up/Flames baptize the filth of plastic surfaces that has migrated onto my precious natural ingredients,” Shaw intones on a track that sounds like a Sleaford Mods piss-take played at 16rpm. Emerging in a whirl of Johnny Marr-style strums, “Blood” is an indictment of the widespread indifference to images of war and genocide splashed on our screens 24/7—at least until Shaw’s narrator derails her train of thought to ponder prosaic house-moving logistics. Even the most emotionally invested of us can get distracted.
Musically and thematically, Secret Love plays as a series of whiplashing vibe shifts, from the deconstructed New Romanticism of “I Need You” to the rocks-off swagger of “The Cute Things,” which presents Dry Cleaning as the rare post-punk-schooled band unafraid to take cues from the Rolling Stones. That eclecticism is reflective of the album’s transatlantic recording process: While Secret Love was completed at a studio in France’s Loire Valley, its darker, doomier tracks were hatched in Dublin with the art-punk pranksters of Gilla Band, while a warmer, earthier approach was cultivated at Wilco’s Chicago studio The Loft.
On those songs, you can hear Dry Cleaning loosen up in real time: “My Soul/Half Pint” begins as an agitated prowl bemoaning the patriarchal division of domestic labor, but the addition of some “Waiting for My Man”-worthy piano plinks and Jeff Tweedy’s guitar grunts transform it into a cheery barroom romp, with an increasingly sanguine Shaw quipping, “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for, like, 500 years.” And when the knotty, Modest Mouse-y guitar line of “Secret Love” suddenly opens up into a crystalline, sweetly cooed chorus, it’s like Shaw has discovered a superpower she didn’t know she possessed. The biggest breakthrough comes in the form of “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit,” which initially scans as the proudly anti-social mutterings of a misfit shut-in (“I can watch this TV show for however long, Armstrong/No one coming along with a video call or a survey or a dick pic”). Yet her words are set to a folky, sax-smoothed pastoral tune about a recluse who clearly doesn’t like being alone as much as she may pretend.
The narrator of “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” is still stuck inside at the end of the song, but the track is emblematic of Dry Cleaning’s own emancipation: a band that was once a model of post-punk austerity has gradually blossomed into a more open-hearted entity. Dry Cleaning close Secret Love with an upbeat indie-rock confection called “Joy,” where Shaw offers her prescription for a better life: “It’s a horrorland/Destruction/Don’t give up/On being sweet.” Her resolute voice noticeably softens on those last three words, as if she were forcing herself to heed her own advice, before delivering the most welcoming chorus hook in the band’s catalog: “Joy/We’ll build a cute harmless world.” Shaw’s vision of utopia may still be a distant fantasy, but it starts to feel a little more real when everyone can sing along.
