REVIEW: Dry Cleaning Releases 3 New Tracks on ‘Secret Love (Deluxe Edition)’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY EMMI SHOCKLEY ☆
Photo by Max Miechowski
SOUTH LONDON EXPERIMENTAL ART-ROCK BAND DRY CLEANING—released their third full-length album, Secret Love, back on January 9 via 4AD. This was the band's first full-length release since 2022’s Stumpwork—a gap they attribute to their extensive tour schedule. It’s safe to say that the interim togetherness did the band a world of creative good. On Secret Love, they’re cohesive and propulsive. You can hear each band member (frontperson and lyricist Florence Shaw, bassist Lewis Maynard, Guitarist Tom Dowse, and percussionist Nick Buxton) leaning entirely into the implicit peculiarities that make them such a strange, captivating, and truly stand-out act.
Dry Cleaning is anything but a middle-of-the-road band—and Secret Love solidified that. It certainly didn’t hurt that the album was produced by Cate Le Bon—a genre-defining (genre-defying?) art-pop-indie-folk artist and increasingly in-demand producer whose past credits include Wilco’s Cousin, Horsegirl’s Phonetics On and On, and Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach and Jesus on a Wire.
Secret Love was met with enthusiasm from fans and critics alike—with Grant Sharples of Paste writing that the four-piece reaches a “zenith” and “ doesn’t succumb to diminishing returns but instead delivers more of what made them such a draw in the first place.” Alexis Pedriti of The Guardian hailed them as the “standout act in the sprechgesang wave.” (Sprechgesang is German for “speech song,” and I’m not going to pretend I knew what that meant before writing this article. It’d make me sound more tapped-in if I did, smarter than if I simply described Shaw’s vocal delivery as “talk-singing,” the way I planned; but I’ll choose transparency here.)
Fortunately for fans, critics, and everyone in between, we just got another dose of Secret Love. On July 15, 4AD released Secret Love Deluxe Edition, complete with two previously unreleased tracks, “Grass” and “I Have the Key,” as well as the March single “Sliced by a Fingernail.”
“The three new songs have a lot of tenderness and vulnerability to them,” says Shaw. “They’re about feelings of love and loss but also humour that comes along with those heavy feelings.”
In Maynard’s words, “As difficult as it is to choose the final tracklist, we've learned with previous records that songs which don't make the album will see the light of day and sometimes even receive more attention. This is the first time we've released a deluxe edition, and we're especially excited because it includes some of our favourite songs from the session.”
Each track comes with an accompanying visualizer – three simple yet provocative videos directed and choreographed by the London-based musician/movement director duo BULLYACHE. The new releases stand as both a cohesive triad and as intuitive inclusions in the larger work that is Secret Love.
I’ve been a fan of this band ever since I first came across their 2019 Sweet Princess EP, which features the tracks “Magic of Meghan” and “Traditional Fish” (two timeless bangers in my opinion). I, like so many of us, often struggle to describe exactly what makes me latch onto a band. It’s even harder to describe the quality that sustains an interest. When it comes to Dry Cleaning, I keep returning to their strangeness. Their commitment to the unexpected.
Their sonic landscape could prove alienating, alien even, to a listener unprepared for their invitation. But that’s the point. Dry Cleaning does not invite a passive, casual listenership. They are an intentionally strange act to behold – constantly playing into and playing up the contrasts within Shaw’s vocals and her bandmates' instrumentations. Shaw delivers “blasé” musings atop dynamic guitar rock that rises, falls, kicks ahead, and writhes around beneath her unwavering, “unbothered” vocals. Notice what I put in quotes here, because I think Shaw’s work as a singer is the furthest thing from careless. Her apathy is feigned – that’s what I like about it. Each of her syllables is its own little indulgence.
Of the three new Deluxe tracks, the band’s sonic contrast is at its best on “Sliced on a Fingernail,” with its satisfying breakdowns, Maynard’s stirring, relentless bassline and Tom Dowse’s blistering guitar riffs. As for Shaw’s narrative on this one, she says it’s about “looking for places to hide; fantasies like packing yourself into the centre of a huge flower bud, but also more everyday ones like being part of the crowd at a karaoke bar.” “Sliced” is the most uptempo of the additions, and it even rivals the album’s first single “Hit My Head All Day” in catchiness.
Across their discography, Dry Cleaning is seldom predictable in their instrumentation, production, or lyrics. Actually, Florence Shaw’s lyrics are never predictable. On Secret Love (Deluxe Edition), her writing and vocal delivery are once again in startling, consistent opposition to any attempts at a passive listen. Just as you may start to feel lulled into her hypnotic, deadpan, stream-of-consciousness rhythm, she’ll sigh out a gutpunch of a verse like this one on “Grass”:
“And then I hugged the track of naked stone / where the glacier used to be. Her eyes filled with tears / (the glacier feeds the river) / as she said, / (the river feeds the lake) / Which plants grow from ash?” Every time I hear her pose that final question, I can’t help but take pause.
Shaw says that “Grass” is about “grieving for someone still alive. The lyrics use some metaphors from nature inspired by two trips, one to see the melting Rhône Glacier in Switzerland and the other to Laurissilva, the ‘living fossil’ ancient forest on the island of Madeira. Whilst it has lots of imperfections and was a bit improvised, Cate had a real affinity for the vocal performance we chose for this track.”
Upon Secret Love’s initial release, Stuart Berman of Pitchfork wrote, “a band that was once a model of post-punk austerity has gradually blossomed into a more open-hearted entity.” I agree with Berman’s sentiment that Secret Love chronicles the band opening up with their most earnest and close-to-the-chest set of songs yet. The Deluxe track “I Hold The Key” just set that in stone for me. On this track, Shaw allows her repetition of the words “surgery,” “blood letting” and “recovery” to ring out as a heartrending refrain. This is the first time a Dry Cleaning song has made me feel genuinely sad without offering me a bit of cheekiness to offset that ache. I thought it was because I’d listened to the track so many times for this review, or because of the way the track’s BULLYACHE visualizer balances stark sterility with bittersweet intimacy, or because I can’t help but feel like it sounds like the end of something, or it’s simply because Shaw wrote such tender, evocative lyrics about the body, its ailments.
Shaw’s own description helped me to name the feeling the song evoked: helplessness. She says the lyrics “came from a feeling of sadness and helplessness at the state of the world. The genocide in Gaza had begun around the time I was writing some of the lyrics.” Then, of the production, “the saxophone part was improvised by Bruce Lamont at the Loft studio in Chicago, and the structure and delivery of the vocal, as well as the choice of words, came as a response to his playing.”
“I Hold The Key” is the stand-out new track in my eyes, and yet another instance of Dry Cleaning’s ability to subvert and surprise.
Secret Love (Deluxe Edition) is available July 15 via 4AD.
