Dry Cleaning – Secret Love
Dry Cleaning return with their third album Secret Love, produced by Cate Le Bon — their most melodically expansive record yet, without losing what makes them tick.
Dry Cleaning have never been easy to place. Florence Shaw talks more than she sings, her lyrics bounce between mundane observation and surrealist imagery, and the band behind her — Nick Buxton on drums, Tom Dowse on guitar, Lewis Maynard on bass — operates between tight post-punk and deliberate looseness. New Long Leg introduced them sharply in 2021. Stumpwork came a year later and proved the formula wasn’t a fluke. Secret Love, their third album on 4AD, is where they start pushing it somewhere new.
The recording process took them across continents. They demoed at Wilco’s Chicago studio The Loft, bashed drums with Gilla Band in Dublin, and eventually ended up in the French Loire Valley with Cate Le Bon. She took over production duties after the band crossed paths with her while she was finishing Wilco’s Cousin. Her presence is felt throughout — the guitar textures on opener “Hit My Head All Day” carry her fingerprints clearly — but she doesn’t take over. Jeff Tweedy contributes guitar on one track without announcing himself. The collaborations are absorbed rather than displayed.
“Hit My Head All Day” is worth lingering on: six minutes, funky bass, synthesizers, and a build that genuinely earns its runtime. The band has cited Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On as a reference point, and you can hear it in the groove’s deliberate tension. “Cruise Ship Designer” follows and runs in the opposite direction — compact, almost punchy, with a chorus that inches closer to actual singing before the guitars go dissonant at the end. “My Soul / Half Pint” wraps strings around a dry rhythm and then opens up when a piano enters late. “Rocks” is scrappier, crumbling distortion pushed to a near-hardcore tempo in the hook, Shaw narrating through it with complete indifference to the chaos underneath.
What changes most on Secret Love is Shaw’s voice. She’s always been the defining, divisive element — the deadpan delivery that either clicks or doesn’t — but here she reaches for melody more often. The title track is a clear example: when she goes up into her higher register on the chorus, it lands differently than anything on the previous records. “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” leans into British folk-rock with acoustic instrumentation that pushes the band into territory they haven’t mapped before, with Pentangle cited as a reference point in the press materials, and it fits. “The Cute Things” adds pedal steel and goes somewhere almost twee, setting off what one source aptly called “small euphony grenades” in the chorus. “Evil Evil Idiot” is a slow, moody counterweight — xylophone and atmosphere, a song about burnt food delivered with maximum disinterest. “I Need You” rides sensitive synths before “Joy” closes the record on a genuinely upbeat note, Shaw promising that joy will build and come, the band behind her sounding like they believe it.
What caught my ear is how the back half of Secret Love keeps finding new textures without announcing them. The folk turn, the pedal steel, the piano that cracks open “My Soul / Half Pint” — none of it feels grafted on.
Dry Cleaning are still an acquired taste. Shaw’s vocals remain a barrier for new listeners, and that’s not going to change. But for anyone already on board, Secret Love is the most varied and melodically confident thing they’ve made. It’s why it’s here.
