There’s nothing quite like pressing play on a new release from Dry Cleaning — or better yet, walking into one of their shows. On any given song, you might hear the English band skipping dexterously through post-punk, dub, funk, jangle, goth, post-rock, or something else, with three wizards on their instruments grooving away in lockstep. At the center of it all, vocalist Florence Shaw delivers an endless spoken-word monologue that sounds like it’s coming from another planet entirely.
It’s a delightfully odd combination that brought in excellent reviews for their 2021 debut, New Long Leg, and their 2022 follow-up, Stumpwork (whose cover art won them a Grammy for Best Recording Package). But by this time last year, they were looking to shake things up on their next album. So they tried auditioning new producers. It didn’t go very well at first.
“We had some producers who, over Zoom, would be showing us their systems, like, ‘I’ve got two Distressors…’ and not talking about the songs we’d sent them,” says bassist Lewis Maynard. “We were quite lost. For a period of time, we spoke about producing it ourselves.”
“That goes to show just how lost we were,” Shaw notes.
“And then my dog was going to produce it, at some point,” Maynard adds.
“She’s got two Distressors as well,” jokes drummer Nick Buxton.
Shaw, Maynard, Buxton, and guitarist Tom Dowse have logged onto Zoom from their respective flats in South London to talk about their third album, Secret Love, out Jan. 9 on 4AD. Coming more than three years after Stumpwork, it’s the best Dry Cleaning album yet, full of intriguing left turns and surprising new swerves that more than justify the months of studio exploration it took to get there.
The story of Secret Love starts more than a year ago, in the spring of 2024, when Dry Cleaning toured small clubs in the U.S. and Europe to celebrate a re-release of the two EPs that won them a cult fanbase in the late 2010s. “When they first came out, I was so surprised that they found an audience,” Shaw says. “Not because I didn’t think they were good enough or anything, but it was just such a bizarre turn of events. It was a shocking thing. So it gave a bit of an opportunity to feel proud of them.”
That fall, they experienced a dizzying shift in scale when they played stadiums in Europe as an opening act for Nick Cave, one of their heroes. “It was more fun than you think it would be,” Dowse says. “You think, how the hell are you going to fill that kind of venue with sound? And what you don’t expect is, [the venues] sound fucking amazing. His crowd were very generous as well. We’d always have quite a few thousand people down the front for our sets.”
In between and around those two tours, they’d begun working on new material without a clear goal in mind. Some songs came from their budding friendship with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who offered the use of his band’s instrument-filled Chicago studio, the Loft, when Dry Cleaning were in town. “I would characterize those as being not a million miles from what we already sounded like,” Dowse says. “Maybe with a slight Wilco bent to it, which is not surprising, as we were using all their equipment and their sound engineer.”
Others came from sessions in Dublin with members of the ferociously loud Gilla Band, who brought in a noisy industrial influence. “We wanted to work with them because we knew they would fuck things up quite a lot,” Dowse says. “That was a really cool experience, because they just sort of took a hacksaw to everything.”
With close to 20 songs that felt miles apart and no idea how to bring them together, they looked for a producer who could solve the riddle. After rejecting Maynard’s dog and several other candidates for the role, they eventually turned to Cate Le Bon, the Welsh art-pop auteur who’s helped bands including Deerhunter, Wilco, and Horsegirl make daring creative leaps in recent years. Le Bon listened closely to what they shared with her and suggested a radical solution: starting over from scratch.
“If someone had come on board and said, ‘It’s done,’ we probably would’ve gone with that. You know what I mean?” Dowse says. “But Cate was adamant we do it all again.”
This past spring, they decamped along with Le Bon to an idyllic farmhouse-turned-studio in the Loire Valley region of northwestern France to give it a try, whittling the tracklist down to 11 songs that they re-recorded in full. “It’s a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but she’s the only one that’s got an idea of the finished picture in her head,” Buxton says. “She’s really good at that.”
Le Bon’s suggestions included urging Shaw to actually sing emotionally direct songs like “Secret Love” and “I Need You,” instead of talking through them as she otherwise would have. “Singing feels like a more vulnerable place for me, and that interested me,” Shaw says. “The tender moments on the album come across that way because they are that. They are tender moments. They felt close to an overshare each time, really. Cate pushed to leave all of those things in, and I’m glad that she did.”
It adds up to a breakthrough that feels like Dry Cleaning’s defining statement, the album they’ve been building up to since those first EPs defied all expectations in 2018 and 2019. Even now, Shaw says, they’re pleasantly amused that the world has followed them this far. “We cannot get used to being a band,” she says. “I swear to God, we’re never going to stop saying it. We’re a band and people listen to us. It’s so weird.”
