On ‘I Need You’, the penultimate track on Dry Cleaning’s new album Secret Love, Florence Shaw throws in a reference to the English version of The Apprentice that most listeners are likely to misinterpret. As she points to the bit “where they’re waiting for the phone call in the waiting room outside/ And the finger coming down: you,” you might bring to mind an image that’s much harder now to laugh at. “There’s an absurdity to that journey,” Shaw has said, describing the show as a stepping stone to Trump’s presidency, “because, in the U.K., The Apprentice is just really dumb.” I can’t make up my mind whether the band’s new album Secret Love, the follow-up to 2022’s Stumpwork, is their darkest or most optimistic, precisely because it blurs the line between harmlessness and real horror, self-growth and destruction. In that way it’s certainly their dreamiest, with subtle, reconstructive production from Cate Le Bon, who helps Dry Cleaning break out of their shell by making them sound more like themselves. It’s hard to take that the wrong way.
1. Hit My Head All Day
It’s not long before the controlled breathwork that opens Secret Love turns into jumbled funk, mirroring the instant mind-shift that occurs when you open your phone first thing in the morning. ‘Hit My Head All Day’ seems to trivialize life’s explosive extremities, the very dryness of a line like “I simply must have experiences” undercutting the influence of social media misinformation. But the song isn’t content with this appearance of numbing absurdity. Tom Dowse’s outstretched guitar phrasing stings without using much brute force, and instead of ending where most of the album’s songs do, it takes a little longer to seep in; Nick Buxton’s synth tugs at a world of feeling where a lone harmonica might have been. You can hit your head all day, but it won’t stop the stuff that’s fed into it from lingering.
2. Cruise Ship Designer
Dry Cleaning follow the album’s longest song with its shortest, though no less indicative of the band’s ethos.“I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” Shaw intones at the end, lest you take a seemingly straightforward song about a nautical entrepreneur’s seemingly harmless ambition at face value. Its jaunty guitar riff betrays the protagonist’s cursory interest in the subject, while Shaw’s delivery emphasizes their stock in idiomatic beliefs. The hidden message, of course, isn’t revealed by her but hinted at by the band’s last-minute (cognitive) dissonance.
3. My Soul / Half Pint
Shaw returns to introspective stream-of-consciousness, relaying the anti-patriarchal thoughts that cross her mind as she puts her house in order. But while the song sways with the resentment in her soul, it somehow has fun with it, ultimately dancing around Jeff Tweedy’s guitar flourishes and Buxton’s barroom piano. By the time Shaw says that “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like, 500 years,” she’s off counting with the same persistence that she used to hit her head. There’s power in imagination, cleanliness be damned.
4. Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)
There’s a beaming synth in the middle of ‘Secret Love’ that lasts for an astounding half minute, making the title track suddenly feel like a baptism. (“The beginning of the world!” Shaw announces at the start.) Everyone in the studio seems to revel in it: Dowse trades his spiky guitar for mandolin reminiscent of Alex G’s major label debut, and Lewis Maynard’s bass is eager to match its melodic majesty. Shaw even dips into her falsetto, unlocking a solemn kind of fragility. It’s a testament to Le Bon’s transformative gift as a producer.
5. Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit
Dry Cleaning have never written a song quite as earnest as ‘Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit’, which smooths over the difference between isolation and boundless inspiration. On top of what is already a silky folk arrangement, Bruce Lamont’s saxophone wafts like a memory before Shaw sings, “People move away from me,” a loneliness that curdles into paranoia: “I constantly think there are spiders on me and around me.” At one point, she declares, “I can watch this TV show for however long, Armstrong,” but it scans more like a theme for A24’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
6. Blood
The dark, knotty ‘Blood’ makes for a striking contrast to ‘Let Me Grow’, veering deeper into the online hellscape of the album’s opener. The first of two songs with contributions from Alan Duggan and Dan Fox of Gilla Band, its relentless programmed drums mirror the horrific images proliferating every millisecond, interrupted only by mundane reality. It only gets bloodier from here.
7. Evil Evil Idiot
Dry Cleaning have made many songs from the perspective of wicked individuals, but rarely one as ugly and embodied as ‘Evil Evil Idiot’, whose protagonist is not a pernicious social climber but someone who likes their food burned. Slowed down and sludged up, it makes their induldgence sound vile and fiery; Buxton’s drums, usually cut-and-dried, are noisily textured, Dowse’s guitar coiled, and Shaw’s lyrics so exacting you could mistake them for diaristic: “The tang of flame kissed natural fibres, frozen at the moment of their incineration is, is, what I live for!” You can almost taste it yourself.
8. Rocks
The punk swagger of ‘Rocks’ carries the momentum forward, but the song feels – ironically, coming after ‘Evil Evil Idiot’ – slightly undercooked. Its disjointedness doesn’t expand into something bigger the way it does elsewhere.
9. The Cute Things
Domesticity can breed resentment, but sometimes it’s just kind of confusing. “I hate it, but I need it,” Shaw admits, of a relationship dynamic that also speaks to the album’s sincerity: it’s a good development, but you still need a sense of humour about it. It’s like reading that your work has a “fearless spirit” – true or not (and I think Secret Love, however confident, is pretty ripe with fear), it’s got to make you laugh.
10. I Need You
‘I Need You’ sounds like a waiting room, the band’s playing making up the four walls. But it’s the bleary synths, with Dowse, Le Bon, and Shaw all contributing, that set the temperature, both sweltering and surreal. In Shaw’s fourth-wall-breaking moment – “So honestly and uniquely getting straight to the listener’s heart/ Fuck the world!” – it’s the word uniquely that stands out, because it’s true. That’s something a music critic would say, of course, but what other band would choose this soundscape for its three-word message?
11. Joy
Better than fearless, ‘Joy’ is a highlight of the album at its most fantastical, clearly and unconventionally inspired by the dreamy optimism of the band’s 2023 tourmate Nourished by Time. The whole album flirts with that realm, but ‘Joy’ finds a worthy chorus for it: “We’ll build a cute harmless world.” Somehow cutesiness is not an odd fit for a band that made its name on wry non-sequitors, but the song rests on the tang of the final line, enunciated: “And I don’t want one from you, cult.” Nice and toasty until it burns.
