Dry Cleaning share new single ‘Gary Ashby’
Dry Cleaning are now three singles deep in the promotional cycle for their sophomore album, Stumpwork. We’ve already heard and loved ‘Don’t Press Me’ and ‘Anna Calls From the Arctic’, and now we’re getting a third single to cherish before the album’s release at the end of October, ‘Gary Ashby’.
“‘Gary Ashby’ is a lament about a pet tortoise, escaped as a result of family chaos,” the band shares in a statement. “We wrote it in December 2020, one of the first new songs after the New Long Leg session”.
‘Gary Ashby’ continues Dry Cleaning’s embrace of more melodic elements of their music. The stylistic shift away from hard-edged post-punk and towards more dreamy alternative rock is looking more and more permanent as we continue to get new singles from the band. Not that it has to be true of all the band’s material: we’ll just have to see what Stumpwork has working for it when it comes out.
This probably isn’t where the title for Stumpwork comes from, but it’s a wonderful use of the term “stumpy legs”, nonetheless. The special attention to the minutia of everyday life makes Dry Cleaning so fascinating – they’re the kind of band that keeps things simple when they write a song about a pet tortoise. The tragedy of giving the animal your family name, only for it to escape from your safe household, is paramount to Shakespearean tragedy in the eyes of Dry Cleaning.
Vocalist Florence Shaw is moving even closer to being a singer. The previous single ‘Anna Calls From The Arctic’ contains her signature monotone monologue, but ‘Gary Ashby’ has some hummable lines in its brief two minutes of existence. No matter how hard they want to lean into melody, I don’t think Dry Cleaning will sound “commercial” any time soon, which is lovely.
Check out the audio for ‘Gary Ashby’ below.
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