Dry Cleaning
Secret Love
4AD

If 2022’s Stumpwork channeled the gritty experience of sorting through a hoarder’s house, Dry Cleaning’s third studio effort, Secret Love, recalls finding that strange, velvet-lined box that’s tucked away in a dusty attic—familiar, yet concealing a nostalgic warmth. Produced by Welsh art-pop sorceress Cate Le Bon, the South London quartet has made a record that sands down their jagged post-punk edges into smooth, surreal pebbles of magical realism.

Le Bon’s fingerprints are smeared delightfully across the album’s production, replacing the band’s usual abrasive starkness with a spacious, almost drowsy psychedelia. On tracks like the six-minute opener “Hit My Head All Day,” guitarist Tom Dowse’s fretwork—influenced by everything from Botch to Guided by Voices on this LP—spirals like smoke rather than cutting like glass, weaving around Nick Buxton’s motorik percussion. Florence Shaw opens the album with the killer line, “Life: a series of memorials and signals telling us this or that.” She remains the band’s gravitational center with a Sprechgesang delivery that’s evolved from detached observation to a kind of intimate, hallucinogenic confession. She’s no longer just reading nondescript rooms; she’s narrating the fever dream of the furniture within it.

Shaw’s lyrics on Secret Love operate in the area between the suffocatingly mundane and the bizarrely fantastical. On the title track, she navigates the banal disappointment of travel with deadpan precision: “New York has been pretty good / We have a couple of days left and as yet I have seen no one famous.” It’s a line that captures the tourist’s hollow gaze, delivered with the dryness of a martini left out in a heatwave. Later, on “I Need You,” the imagery dissolves into domestic surrealism: “I’m waiting inside a talcum powder box / For you to lift the lid and discover me.” The yearning of romance is rendered small, dusty, and fragrant, the band keeping a rock pulse even when the lyrics turn heartfelt.

The album’s brilliance lies in these sudden shifts from suburban sterility to visceral body horror. “Cruise Ship Designer” sees Shaw inhabiting the soul of a passionless worker bee, intoning, “Cruises are big business / I don’t personally like them / But I need to serve a useful purpose.” It’s a hilarious, grim portrait of late-stage capitalism, underscored by a bass line from Lewis Maynard that feels like a stiff, nervous walk down an alleyway. Conversely, “Blood” strips away the irony for something far more unsettling. “Blood on my skin / And hands and nails / And in my eyes, as well,” Shaw murmurs, turning the horrors of the 24-hour news cycle into a physical stain that can’t be washed out.

Secret Love is a post-punk record of scrawled notes and balled fists. It’s less aggressive than its predecessors, but perhaps more insidious and, ultimately, enjoyable. It ends on a note of defiant tenderness with “Joy,” wherein Shaw offers a directive that feels like a mantra for survival in a disintegrating world: “Don’t give up on being sweet.” Dry Cleaning continues to not just clean the laundry of life; they also find the strangely beautiful receipts left in the pockets.

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