Dry Cleaning – ‘Secret Love’ album review: More moods equals further freakishness
With the world descending even further into unbridled chaos around us, while its inhabitants invariably have to deal with the monotony and humdrum of everyday life, it takes a band like Dry Cleaning to truly speak to the times we live in with their witty observations on the peculiar predicaments we find ourselves confronting.
The Skinny: Even from their earliest years as a band, the London foursome have explored ennui through vocalist Florence Shaw’s offbeat sense of humour and peculiar non-sequiturs, all backed up by often minimalist post-punk presentation. However, to say that their third album, Secret Love, is a simple rehash of the formula would be missing the fact that they’ve gradually built upon these foundations to create something with a continuous capacity to grow.
It would be all very well for the band to have cashed in on the successes of their first two EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, by rinsing and repeating the formula heard on standout tracks like ‘Magic of Meghan’ and ‘Viking Hair’.
Debut album New Long Leg wasn’t too much of a diversion from this, but was significantly more refined, and Stumpwork was a foul beast that took all of the most demented elements of their identity and fucked with them to the max.
With there being very few elements to their sound, a trip back to the drawing board needed to be done before resuming with their continued ascent, and the first port of call for the band in terms of sprucing up the sonic aspects came in the form of recruiting Cate Le Bon as a producer, rather than John Parish, who they had entrusted for their first two albums. The Welsh artist’s fingerprints are everywhere on Secret Love, but that’s not to say that Dry Cleaning have allowed their craft to be completely subsumed by the strong identity of their collaborator.
Another collaborator rears his head in the form of Jeff Tweedy, with whom they had a chance encounter while touring in support of Stumpwork, with the single song he appears on as a second guitarist, ‘My Soul Half Pint’, being one of the album’s highlights with its snarling licks.
While the band’s own guitarist, Tom Dowse, continues to be a highlight across the record, with his range diving between noise rock and jangle pop sensibilities at the drop of a hat, it’s also clear from the variety in their selected collaborators that they’re intent on not being pigeonholed as stragglers from the short-lived sardonic post-punk boom that the UK experienced in the late 2010s.
Opening track, ‘Hit My Head All Day’, is as close as the band have ever veered towards being danceable, ‘Evil Evil Idiot’ is as intense and sludgy as they’ve sounded, and ‘Rocks’ is seemingly a stab at An Ideal For Living-era Joy Division.
While this myriad of attempts to shapeshift suggests that this record could turn out to represent a transitional period where they attempt to find a new sound to settle into in the grand scheme of things, it’s clear that they’re still pretty good at whatever style they attempt in the interim.
The Verdict: Moods shift regularly, both through Shaw’s expanded ability to convey emotions through her oddball mutterings and through the sonic diversions that the band choose to undertake, but in spite of it being the band’s most varied record to date, the cohesion and obvious Dry Cleaning stamp has remained intact.
Defining track: ‘My Soul Half Pint’
Release Date: January 9th, 2026 | Producer: Cate Le Bon | Label: 4AD
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