Dry Cleaning

Dry Cleaning – Secret Love
Secret Love is the finest expression yet of the profound friendships that created Dry Cleaning. Here,
frontperson Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard
take their place in rock’s avant garde, catalysing the Reaganite paranoia of early 80s US punk and
hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave and
pastoral fingerpicking, while Florence’s delivery, meticulously calibrated to her bandmates’
soundscapes, asserts her in a lineage of spoken-word artists stretching from Laurie Anderson to Life
Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins. Producer Cate Le Bon likens the impression of listening to walking
through a city; these 11 songs might also arrive like distinct images in a gallery.

The record started life in Peckham rehearsal spaces, the south London four-piece writing, playing and
responding to each other in the room, the instrumentalists egging each other on as Florence drew from
her collection of postcards and found materials: in Dry Cleaning, music and lyrics form an inseparable,
generative whole. Then they bundled their demos in a suitcase and took them to musical friends with
strong palettes to test and twist them. Secret Love evolved through affirming sessions at Jeff Tweedy’s
Chicago studio the Loft and explosive ones with Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox in Dublin,
taking advantage of the sonic particulars of each space, and finally with Cate in the Loire Valley. Some
acts would fear being subsumed by these other musical iconoclasts. Dry Cleaning wanted to push
themselves harder than they ever had before. “We’re very confident about our identity,” says Florence.
“It doesn’t seem to be possible to break it down.”

The opposite: Secret Love is a singular, career-defining statement, coming after debut New Long Leg
(2021) and Stumpwork (2022). They push the cheeky no wave of compulsively catchy lead single ‘Hit
My Head All Day’ somewhere totally unexpected, powered by pistons of breathy synths and magnificent
cresting arcs of guitar. ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ is a classic Dry Cleaning pop song in the vein of ‘Gary
Ashby’, sung from the perspective of a nautical entrepreneur who has deluded himself that his work
serves society. There is unprecedented darkness in ‘Blood’, a lurch between forlorn chill and desperate
alarm that confronts the normalisation of witnessing atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank and Ukraine
online, and the British government’s callous, capitalist attitude to war. Amid these disingenuous actors,
Florence turns over questions of trust, and volunteers more of herself than ever before, a profound
gesture of connection. She finds Secret Love “quite sad and dark,” she says, but feels good about the
honesty of that reflection. “I really love confessional things,” she says. “It always makes me feel calm
when people are sharing hidden stuff. I hate when you get a sense that there’s stuff people aren’t saying.”

The more introspective songs search for coherence between interior and exterior: the panicked longing
for connection in spite of the certainty that people are repulsed by you in the Pentangle-influenced ‘Let
Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit’; the warring frustration, lust and foolishness in the bristling crucible
of ‘Rocks’, Dry Cleaning’s most teeth-gritting rager. ‘My Soul / Half Pint’ is the goofiest expression of
this tension, exploring Florence’s love of tidying – organising to a satisfying internal logic – but hatred
of cleaning, a tedious social good. The album affirms the power of coherence in love. The celestial ‘Secret
Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)’ preserves an unspoken crush for eternity. ‘The Cute Things’ is
a daydreamy swirl about the beauty of self-sacrifice in true relationships; the barely adorned pulse of ‘I
Need You’ uses the characteristically off-kilter image of being fired by Donald Trump on The Apprentice
as an analogue to the beautifully deranged pressure of pinning all your hopes on one partner: “The
finger coming down: you.”

It’s no mistake that Secret Love ends on a similarly optimistic note to Stumpwork. ‘Icebergs’, the closing
track to their second album, advised: “Stay interested in the world around you / Keep the curiosity of a
child if you can.” Here, the song ‘Joy’ offers “don’t give up on being sweet” in the face of troubling
mansophere cults. It can be hard not to feel overwhelmed by the lurid grotesques beaming dogma from
your FYP page and wonder if you shouldn’t give up and join them. But Secret Love is a reminder to find 
the people you can go floppy with; a transmission of the band’s love and trust in one another that
listeners might share in, too.