Credit: Max Miechowski

Dry Cleaning pick their favourite songs of the last five years

Thu 15 January 2026 10:00, UK

Post-punk never really goes away, sitting steadfast in rock and pop’s otherwise fickle climate with a near certitude for nearly half a century.

Case in point is London’s Dry Cleaning, carrying on the post-punk mantle but imbuing their jagged and angular terrain with a uniquely surrealist wash of hazy, amorphous genre grab bags, easily hoarding dreampop indie and industrial prickle into their nebulous sound.

On the eve of their third album’s release, Secret Love, vocalist Florence Shaw and guitarist Tom Dowse met with the Far Out team at south London’s The Ivy House to feature in the third instalment of our Existential Boozer series. As usual, a winding traverse of topics was covered, jumping between loathed politicians, the perils of middle age, and the charm of drummer Nick Buxton’s dog.

Most intriguing, however, was the pair’s opening up on what they felt was the best song of the past five years.

After a lengthy internal rifle through heavy rotations and personal record collections, Shaw plays fast and loose with the five-year criteria, opting for Jessica Pratt’s reflective folk piece ‘Back Baby’ from 2015’s On Your Own Love Again. “It just moves me so much,” she confesses. “I love the sound of her voice. It’s like from another planet.”

Shaw also presents an intriguing interpretation of ‘Back Baby’s lyrical wander across a one-sided, fraught relationship with heartache never too far away. “I think it’s about her mother,” Shaw posits. “That really interested me that it wasn’t about a romantic relationship. It was about a relationship between her and her mum, and it’s just beautiful. It’s like perfect. When I play it, when it gets to the end, I just start it again, you know? I can’t listen to it once.”

Dowse similarly seems pained to pick just one among a suspected volume of much-loved tunes. Staying put well within the five-year challenge, however, Geese frontman Cameron Winter’s debut solo effort from 2024 Heavy Metal ultimately swayed Dowse to pick its emotional but not “overly shmaltzy” number, ‘Love Takes Miles’, an ode to love’s often interruptive and out of nowhere surprise when one is less than prepared for its tumultuous effect.

“That album crept up on me,” Dowes recalled, remembering the occasional Heavy Metal cuts that would make it into Dry Cleaning’s Disco Pickles NTS show by the other band members. “Every time I’d be like, ‘This is interesting. What’s this?’…Eventually, I got into it. I think it’s not easy to find a fresh way talking about love in love songs. I think he’s really managed it with [’Love Takes Miles’].”

Dowes added, “He’s brought a totally different way of doing it, and it’s really refreshing. It’s very charming, very sweet, makes you feel all the emotions you want from a love song.”

Shaw concurred, drawing attention to a line from ‘Love Takes Miles’ perfectly illustrating Winters’ idiosyncratic but heartfelt songwriting pen. “I like when he says ‘Love will make you fit it all in the car.’ I just think that’s amazing.”