Cassette
4AD (2026) WW
After the one two punch of New Long Leg and Stumpwork, Dry Cleaning have taken some years to develop their sound, and they return with their third album Secret Love: more paced, more considered, and more daring than before. Free to explore new spaces and faces after the lockdown sessions that loomed over those earlier albums, the band have found a new producer in Cate Le Bon, who teases out influences from further afield into Dry Cleaning’s post punk melange.
Where their previous work ceded control to the rapids of streams of consciousness, Secret Love finds each member more attuned to the construction and progression of their songs. Their performances are somehow slackened yet slicker, punchy with room to contemplate as tropically tinged hand drums meet pneumatic drum machines, dextrous guitars get ensnared in the surrounding bass, and surreality is grounded by structure. Tarry bass and scorched shreds contrast against the spacey vibraphone reverberations on ‘Evil Evil Idiot’, while the title track is as tender as a band like Dry Cleaning can get with falsetto and warm backing vocals over glittering gold harp like plucks.
Indeed, friction seems to define Secret Love: hints of lounge rub against throbbing rhythms and gauzy guitar shreds, drums exhale with thorny tangles of bass, and melodic hushed spoken word grapples with the social media scourge of weaponised misinformation as the band offer listeners new avenues. “I find cleaning demeaning,” Florence Shaw deadpans against the gyrating Americana twangs of ‘My Soul / Half Pint’ featuring Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for, like, 500 years.”
Tracklist
Tracklist
1 Hit My Head All Day
2 Cruise Ship Designer
3 My Soul / Half Pint
4 Secret Love (Concealed In A Drawing Of A Boy)
5 Let Me Grow And You'll See The Fruit
6 Blood
7 Evil Evil Idiot
8 Rocks
9 The Cute Things
10 I Need You
11 Joy
Bonus Tracks For Japan
12 The Cute Things (Tascam Version)
13 Let Me Grow And You'll See The Fruit (Tascam Version)