Dry Cleaning strike while the iron is hot on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’
Dry Cleaning have released their second single from the upcoming album, Secret Love, and it’s as classically nonsensical and groovealicious as we’ve come to expect from the south London guitar band.
Their first single since 2023, ‘Hit My Head All Day’, was an almost six-minute epic of swirling, shuddering influences and a new light mobility to an otherwise dreary post-punk world.
The second single, which also acts as the second track on the album, plays things a little straighter. On the single, acerbic vocalist Florence Shaw takes the perspective of a nautical entrepreneur who has deluded himself that his work serves society. They press forward at a steady pace with an addictive, if simplistic, guitar riff.
Only after the two-minute mark do the band expand upon the musical motifs conjured at the beginning of the song, and even then, the experimentation is overwrought, quickly fizzing out to an early end.
In direct competition with the track that comes before, it’s hard not to see this as a little lacklustre.
As the track closes with the wry comment, “It’s a boat for a powerful mind / I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” the cruise ship designer exemplifying a non-functional role in society that rests upon the idealism of useless hermeneutics suddenly morphs into that of a creative, a lyricist, a band like Dry Cleaning.
How does one add real worth to society? How do we delineate the importance of skill? Is there a place for art anymore? Is being known the same as being valued?
Dry Cleaning ask all of the pertinent questions in this unlikely tale that is barrelled forward with a jangly guitar riff. Sure, the atmosphere reflects the sad cruise-ship world, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing; in this case, the subject is better than the sound.
Secret Love is set for a January 2026 release. Dry Cleaning have until then to steer the cruise ship to a sturdier shore.
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