Album of the Week: Dry Cleaning – Secret Love
Out of the umpteen post-punk bands that sprang up during the middle of the last decade, South London’s Dry Cleaning stuck out, protruding to the foreground like a fast and bulbous, pink, sore thumb. Of the many bands mining the influence of The Fall, Wire, et al., Dry Cleaning, led by the unique vocal and lyrical talents of singer Florence Shaw, also seemed to be the ones with both a propensity for experimentation and a will to move beyond the layman’s understanding of post-punk and its rather limited stylistic constraints.
While some of Dry Cleaning’s contemporaries from the great post-punk purge of the late 2010s have since gone off in different directions, often sweeping all remnants of post-punk up from the studio floor, dumping it in a neat pile, and instead welcoming the onset of the inevitable arena-rock sound, replete with anthemic singalongs, Dry Cleaning appear to have veered in the opposite, more inward direction. Here, they double down on their innate oddness and release what is arguably both their most polished and fully realised record to date.
The genesis of new album Secret Love is one that is both immediate and, on the whole, more drawn out and difficult than the albums that preceded it, perhaps explaining the almost four-year gap between records. In the process of making Secret Love, the group made the decision to ditch John Parish, producer of both New Long Leg (2019) and Stumpwork (2022). They recorded demos in Dublin with like-minded experimentalists Gilla Band, as well as sessions at London’s Fish Factory resulting in 20 new tracks, before eventually settling on the increasingly in-demand Cate Le Bon as producer. The band relocated to a studio in the Loire Valley, France, in 2025 and re-recorded existing tracks at Le Bon’s insistence and under her guidance.
The result is an instant classic, one that finds the band patiently exploring every nook and cranny of their trademark sound, rinsing each element to its fullest possibility. For those au-fait with Le Bon’s own work as a solo artist and collaborator, the distorted, twisted intricacies of Secret Love will come as no surprise, and touchstones may be found on the spindly, post-punk of Le Bon’s Crab Day (2016), and her collaborative work as one-half of the duo Drinks on Hermits on Holiday (2015) and Hippo Lite (2018).
The sublime six-minute opener, with an equally sublime title and chorus refrain, Hit My Head All Day marries a disco-not-disco-esque rhythm to a wiry, catchy, distorted guitar motif, over which the mysteriously charismatic Shaw slowly unwinds a wry stream-of-consciousness monologue that appears to critique modern society’s insistence upon commercialising the idea of an experience.
Experiences such as a luxury cruise, perhaps, and the psyche of the designers of such lavish vessels comes under a critical microscope on the following track, Cruise Ship Designer. Amid a web of tangled guitars and patient, steady percussion, Shaw stands out with humorous lyrical nuggets including “I don’t personally like them, but I need to serve a useful purpose”, ending with the foreboding, darkly comic, “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work”. Perhaps Shaw eyes her reflection here, as has been the case with previous Dry Cleaning records, with Secret Love you can really take your pick from many lyrical non-sequiturs and seemingly random, droll observations to pint your own picture and draw your own conclusions.
While echoes of Wire and Gang of Four will no doubt spring to mind throughout Secret Love, the album and band do something altogether more interesting in that they appear to bridge the gap between the seemingly opposing worlds of progressive music and punk rock. The very English idea of whimsy and outsider concerns, everyday minutiae, runs throughout the album, though it is often paired with a sound palette that, while intricate and considered, is abrasive, sinewy, and web-like, mirroring Shaw’s approach to wordplay and recalling the spirit of awkward British and American bands existent between the prog and punk years, as well as Beefheart, The Red Krayola, The Pop Group, Pere Ubu, Chrome.
While there’s often a melancholy to Shaw’s lyrical focus on the insignificance and discreetness of aspects of the contemporary world, Blood, which introduces a welcome dub-reggae bass groove and scratchy, rhythmic guitars, offers a direct, timely and genuinely affecting depiction of the horrors of war and genocide. Elsewhere, Rocks is nauseous, propulsive post-punk, full of wonky, noisy, off-kilter queasiness, while the band brings the tempo down a notch on Evil Evil Idiot, which, like the excellent opening track, offers a patient unravelling of sound and, in all of its desolate nature, is a real triumph. Likewise, the comparative spareness of penultimate track I Need You is the album’s closest thing to straight-up beauty, and its sine-like drones, shuffling rhythm, and manipulated choral effect provide a very welcome, although brief, excursion.
Secret Love continues Dry Cleaning’s restless exploration of post-punk’s outer limits, offering an ambitious and confident reconfiguration of the sound introduced on New Long Leg (2019) and Stumpwork (2022). Sleeker but less instantly accessible, it is a slow-burn album that rewards those listeners willing to get lost, tangled within its knotty, idiosyncratic charms.
Dry Cleaning – Secret Love is available now on Vinyl, CD & Cassette Tape
