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.)
