DRY CLEANING - Secret Love

Four years on from “Stumpwork”, Dry Cleaning are back. The new album “Secret Love” had a long and winding gestation: it began in rehearsal rooms in Peckham, on the outskirts of London, continued across studios in Dublin with Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, moved through Sonic Studios, also in Dublin, and Jeff Tweedy's studio in Chicago, before finally being completed at Black Box, in the Loire Valley, with Cate Le Bon producing.

The Welsh musician, who takes over from John Parish – the band's producer since their debut – refurnishes the Dry Cleaning sound by exploring new directions: synths, double-tracked vocals, more layered textures and hints of her own surrealist art-pop all come into play. The band thus shows a clear will to break free of the post-punk cage that defined their debut “New Long Leg” and that they had already started to question on the sophomore effort “Stumpwork”.

Even at the songwriting stage, a different use of Florence Shaw's voice emerges: less detached and no longer confined solely to the flow of spoken word, it's more involved in the band's musical development, without giving up on passages that come close to actual singing. The cover art seems to echo the famous eye-slitting shot from Buñuel's “Un Chien Andalou”, a landmark of surrealist cinema, but also the blurring of the contemporary gaze: a vision clouded by social media and by an information system that tends to distort reality, fuelling ever more intolerant forms of fanaticism. It's certainly a theme close to the band's heart, but not the only one, fitting into a broader lyrical universe that Florence Shaw explores through a free, unfiltered stream of words.

Her songs parade bizarre characters and everyday situations pushed to the extreme: figures proudly willing to accept unglamorous jobs (“Cruise Ship Designer”), to shamelessly declare their love for burnt food (“Evil Evil Idiot”), or to celebrate the pleasures of a solitary day, one in which “nobody turns up with a video call, a survey or a dick pic” (“Let Me Grow And You’ll See The Fruit”).

There's no shortage of female frustration after years of forced labour in the kitchen (“My Soul/ Half Pint”), the difficulty of living alongside the suffering caused by wars raging across the world (“Blood”), and the effort of staying positive in an increasingly unstable reality (“Joy”). Running through it all are irony, obsessions, nonsense, drifts into the subconscious and nods to advertising rhetoric: in short, the surreal, enchanted world of a brooding Florence Shaw.

Musically speaking, “Secret Love” is without doubt Dry Cleaning's most varied work, able to blend different languages, enhanced by Cate Le Bon's sophisticated, visionary production. The record manages to bring together rough, angular rhythms and elegant guitar lines (“Hit My Head All Day”), Keith Richards-style riffs (“The Cute Things”), fingerpicked folk with a Sixties flavour (“Let Me Grow And You’ll See The Fruit”), subtle synth melodies woven into Laurie Anderson-esque vocal textures (“I Need You”), as well as wary basslines torn apart by distorted explosions (“Evil Evil Idiot”) and descents into hell driven by Tom Dowse's corrosive guitar (“Rocks”).

If one of the titles can be read as a message, “Let Me Grow And You’ll See The Fruit” seems to sum up the meaning of the album perfectly.

With “Secret Love”, Dry Cleaning finally show the fruit of their journey: they reshape the contours of their music while staying true to their own formula. A formula that might have seemed limited and at risk of running out of steam, but one that here proves able to renew itself and win over listeners more than ever.

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17/01/2026