Dry Cleaning – Secret Love review: distinctive brilliance from London’s sharpest punk narrators
From the outset, Dry Cleaning felt built to defy expectations. Florence Shaw’s clipped spoken-word delivery, paired with her bandmates’ tense, lurching take on post-punk, immediately set them apart. Their first two records, New Long Leg and Stumpwork, arrived in quick succession, released just a year apart in 2021 and 2022. With their third album, Secret Love, the band return after a pause that brings both space and intention, recalibrating their approach as they collectively prove their sound has further reach.
One of the clearest signals of that shift is the decision to work with a new producer. Instead of returning to John Parish, the band placed the album in the hands of Cate Le Bon, whose presence is felt almost instantly. The record leans more openly into folk textures: a cool, cutting mandolin threads through the title track, while dizzying, finger-picked acoustic guitars take centre stage on “Let Me Grow And You’ll See the Fruit”. There’s even a sense that Le Bon encouraged Shaw’s previously silent bandmates to step up to the microphone, delivering dry, deadpan backing vocals on “Cruise Ship Designer” that fit the band’s humour perfectly.
But for every step into gentler territory, Secret Love offers an opposing pull. Opening track “Hit My Head All Day”, stretching past the six-minute mark, rides a relentless drum loop that nods toward nocturnal, motorik repetition. Bassist Lewis Maynard slinks through the groove with a funk-inflected confidence, weaving around Nick Buxton’s subtly placed percussion as Shaw delivers some of the album’s sharpest and funniest lines, including the wonderfully blunt confession: “When I was a child / I wanted to be a horse”. Elsewhere, “Rocks” pairs some of Tom Dowse’s most abrasive guitar work yet with a pounding industrial snare, pushing further into noise than even the band’s earliest releases might have dared.
Amid all these shifts, Shaw remains the band’s anchor. She continues to test the limits of her own hesitant singing voice, which unexpectedly produces some of the record’s most immediately catchy moments. Still, it’s when she slips back into her spoken, stream-of-consciousness mode that she feels most at home. On the jangling standout “Blood”, she strings together stark, opaque phrases — “Pilgrimage / Private life / Mortality / Deep shock felt in the body” — turning abstraction into something strangely intimate.
Secret Love is confident and finely judged, not because it repeats what Dry Cleaning have done before, but because it gently undermines expectations built by their earlier work. By refusing to settle into what could easily have become a narrowly defined formula, the band continue to stretch and reshape their identity. Even as they operate at the edges of their sound, Dry Cleaning are still uncovering new ground — and it feels like they’re only getting started.
