Revisiting Dry Cleaning’s ‘Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess’
Nowadays, Dry Cleaning are flying high on the upper echelons of post-punk greatness. Their two studio albums, New Long Leg and the 2022 follow-up Stumpwork, shot the south London group to the heights of the album charts and bumped up the lineups of countless festivals. In 2018, however, the band mastered their craft, playing tiny venues and earning their post-punk stripes with Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess.
Sweet Princess was reportedly recorded entirely in one day before the band had even set foot on stage together. An absolute tour-de-force of an inaugural release, the EP first introduced audiences to Dry Cleaning’s unique voice. Amid a sea of post-punk landfill, the group always stood out as determined to carve their own individual sound, which fans instantly responded to. The band’s manifesto espouses a dedication to simplicity; their tracks are not the most technically complex because they do not need to be. Dry Cleaning are ruthlessly anti-pop in the greatest sense of the term.
Following on from the success of Sweet Princess, Dry Cleaning quickly set about recording Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, its title paying homage to the band’s rehearsal space. The EP heavily hints at the kind of sound that would later develop on debut album, New Long Leg, featuring a much bigger soundscape than its predecessor. Of course, the release still maintains the signature voice that Dry Cleaning fans know and love, characterised by diversely upbeat backing and the beautifully monotonous voice of Florence Shaw.
The two initial EPs convey similar atmospheres, likely due to the fact that they were recorded in such quick succession. Together, they present an endearing image of the band in their early days, figuring out their sound and taking trips down new musical avenues. While they might be criticised for not sounding quite so polished as the band’s more recent material on Stumpwork, the rough-and-ready nature of these early EPs form part of their broad appeal.
Make no mistake; Dry Cleaning were operating at an incredibly high level even in those early years; Boundary Road, in particular, provides an impressively mature sound for a group that had been together for a relatively short period of time. The fact that their early work is simultaneously rough-and-ready and profoundly innovative speaks to their noted musical talent, which went on to receive more widespread recognition upon the release of their full-length studio records.
What’s more, there is a definite sense of excitement captured within this early period, a real feeling that the group were enjoying this new musical project – despite what Shaw’s sardonic vocals might have you believe. This is particularly evident at the end of tracks like ‘Sombre One’, which manages to bottle that excited atmosphere of being at the start of your journey as a band.
Speaking to the impact of these two EPs, tracks like ‘Goodnight’ or ‘Magic of Meghan’ from Sweet Princess remain fan-favourites, receiving overwhelmingly joyous responses during the band’s live performances. Recently, the band paid homage to their humble beginnings, announcing a reissue of these first two EPs on vinyl, to be released later this year on 4AD.
