After a perfect debut and a Grammy-winning followup, the South London foursome comes fully uncorked on the Cate Le Bon-produced Secret Love—an album celebrating the mundane in the face of global regression.
If I may borrow a phrase from Lisa Robinson, Dry Cleaning is one of those bands with the capacity to change your life. I like to listen to Dry Cleaning’s debut album, New Long Leg, in the car. It drives my girl plumb batshit every time the grip of “Scratchcard Lanyard” tightens while we merge into the demonic clutter of the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Much of the song’s power comes from vocalist Florence Shaw—a bookish, shamanistic linguist whose acerbic lyrics tend to spool like barbed wire. Her singing has fangs, even in its sustained, railroad-flat timbre. Eight years ago, Shaw entered the picture at the behest of an old friend, Tom Dowse, who welcomed her into his new band Dry Cleaning, recording two EPs (Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks) back to back. In 2021, Shaw distilled her frenetic fascinations into an in-motion line delivered passively: “Do everything and feel nothing.” Her charisma heightens the cadence of her bandmates’ already high pulse, which thrums but never thuds. There’s all this rhythm in her delivery, even when she’s talking about a Tokyo bouncy ball, an Oslo bouncy ball, and a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball. Few bands get to kick off a career with a track like “Scratchcard Lanyard.”
Dry Cleaning lives and plays in London. “Art rock” gets overspent these days, but in this context, this band’s material certainly has purchase. London, art rock… maybe the Windmill in Brixton comes to mind, because Dry Cleaning makes the type of slanted music that went kablooey inside that pub in the late-2010s—think those early Squid, black midi, and shame records. But even those freeform associations run thin after a bit. Dry Cleaning shares more DNA with Sabbath, Television, XTC, and Berlin-era Lou Reed than most, if not all, of their English contemporaries. Still, at some point you stop trying on styles. Imitation becomes utilization. “Everyone has quite a strong philosophy on their playing and how they approach their instrument, how they want to play, and where their tastes are,” drummer Nick Buxton says. “That makes up the core identity of who we are as players. But there’s this element where you can be someone else for a bit, which is fun to do, but I think it only comes with confidence.”
In hindsight, the first two Dry Cleaning albums—New Long Leg and Stumpwork—were conservative, even minimalist, when it came to taking that specific kind of risk. “I would think to myself, ‘Oh, no, that’s a bit silly. You can’t do that,’” Buxton remembers. “And I look back at that now and think, ‘Oh, what the hell?’” The perspective of early-career distrust played a factor, he argues. “Your band is being put in a box with all these other bands. Spreading your wings musically feels kind of dangerous and a little bit foolish at times.”
Spread your wings wide enough, though, and categorization itself becomes foolish. Take a press release’s description of Dry Cleaning’s new album, Secret Love: the music is characterized as “catalyzing the Reaganite paranoia of early ‘80s U.S. punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave, and pastoral fingerpicking.” It’s a mouthful and it doesn’t even mention the influence of techno music on Buxton—but it clears. Dry Cleaning turns rock and roll inside out with veritable technique, emotion, and pattern, all of which rings out from Dowse’s Danelectro. Lewis Maynard’s lyrical bass lines and Buxton’s meat-and-potatoes kitwork remain in constant conversation with Shaw’s psycho-sensational readings of global depravity (“the world is laughing at me, I am such a disaster”) and human comedy (“when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”). While her bandmates rattle around her in chiaroscuro freakouts, Shaw bakes poetry into the hairy rhythms of her typhoon talk-singing, into the pronunciation of a line like “salt, sugar, vivid dish cloths, lava skylight mouth of hell.”
The Keith Richards mention leapt out at me. Stones records are dependable fantasies, much like Dry Cleaning records. “I was thinking, aside from the heroin, ‘What would Keith do?’ It helped my playing a lot,” Dowse says of his writing. “When Keith gets going, and when the Stones get going, there’s not a lot of fluctuation. It doesn’t go up, nothing jumps out. But nothing dips down either.” A Dry Cleaning song like “My Soul / Half Pint” sounds like a party because the band is weaving through shades of rhythm. The decorative and immediate treble of “Cruise Ship Designer” is like that, too: Shaw’s slinky, humid pace gets capstoned by Dowse’s restless eruption until the whole band reaches a zagging, dissonant crescendo. The song’s a bottle half-buried in the sand but already uncorked. Once it starts going, it’s just a few riffs. “When you get to Sticky Fingers,” Dowse starts, “all the stuff Keith’s doing on ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’… he’s got mistakes in it, and that’s what I really try to do for myself now.” Like Richards, Dowse gets a toasted vibe going and holds it, sketching parts but not fleshing them out all the way. That’s why Richards needed a second guitarist like Mick Taylor, because he wanted someone else to put the icing on the cake. But Dowse has got far more than just cocaine eyes. His counterparts, motorik players Buxton and Maynard, traffic just enough in the repetitive and groovy to fill his gaps.
I ask Dowse if, like Richards, he is consciously working off lead and rhythm lines, or if he’s instead adapting to the high and low range points of a song. He says that Dry Cleaning records are all about frequency. Shaw is “all the mids,” sitting in the middle range. Maynard is the bass, and Buxton plays cymbals and kick drum that operate in separate registers. “You’re trying to bring a different voice at different parts,” Dowse explains. “There’s something happening that Flo’s doing, and I think to myself: there’s room for another voice there.” It’s about weaving around each other, he explains, because “one moment, you’re in the driving seat, and then somebody else is. You have to make space.” The guitar solo in “My Soul / Half Point” is a good and necessary example of that, from a songwriter’s perspective. “Something needed to happen there, and it had to be a different voice,” Dowse says. “You could bring in another instrument, but I just wrote a solo for it.” And it’s a pedestrian-sounding solo, at that—a predominantly solo version of what the chords were doing earlier in the song. But that’s what makes it so good: Dry Cleaning extracts different shades from the same idea.
Which is why the fingerpicked “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” is so satisfyingly circular—repetitive in a way that evokes sample loops, drone inertia, house music rotations, the recoil of a drum delay. There’s a little bit of that in “Cruise Ship Designer,” as well, even though Dowse’s guitar playing runs skronky in that one. Buxton says repetition means everything to him. “It’s a less-is-more approach that allows you to make something of the change. When you’re making a subtle change, you can put more emphasis into that having real meaning,” he says. Maynard jumps in, mentioning that “from the very start of this band, we were writing seven, eight-minute songs that were more krautrock-y. Then we’d edit them down to pop song length, three minutes or so.”
AFTER TWO YEARS OF TOURING and three festival seasons, Dry Cleaning needed a break. Back at home in London, they were itching to start writing LP3, but the label wanted to re-release the band’s first two EPs instead. “It seemed like a good idea, to do a tour of that material,” Dowse concedes. “It was quite appealing actually, because we could go back to playing slightly smaller venues, play as a four-piece, and just rock out a bit.” So they did that, returning to Peckham in the summer to write Secret Love, but before long, they had to go off and open for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. “By the time we actually got around to writing the record, we were just itching to write,” Dowse continues. “We wanted to concentrate on it. We were still playing a lot, but we were ready to write.” Maynard concurs with his bandmate: “Playing both our most recent stuff and the earlier stuff really did inspire Secret Love. It pushed us into more interesting directions and showed us the palette that we already had wanted to expand on.” Cave’s stadium crowds were welcoming. Dowse says they weren’t the dancing type, that there was never a mosh pit to get lost in, but that wasn’t a bad thing. “They’re there to watch and to listen, which really helps a support band where they don’t know your music—because they’re quite engaging and they’re quite respectful. That was nice, because we haven’t done many support shows.”
In lieu of payment for playing Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in 2023, Dry Cleaning requested studio time at the alt-country icons’ not-so-secret hideout in Chicago, The Loft. There, they met Cate Le Bon, who was working on Cousin with Wilco. The space, Le Bon tells me, is a “magical place that puts people in each other’s paths.” The environment that Jeff Tweedy and his associates have created there allows artists to feel uninhibited. It was the perfect place for Le Bon and Dry Cleaning to hit it off. After introductions, they sent Le Bon about 20 demos they’d tracked in Dublin and London, which felt tactile to her in a way she hadn’t heard their music sound before. “I was really excited by that,” Le Bon says. “There were these jagged edges to them and this kind of energy I was activated by.” And in those songs, Dry Cleaning’s four-person identity shone. “You take one out of the equation and it’s no longer Dry Cleaning,” Le Bon says. “I really felt that tension and energy in the demos.” The songs, recorded in different cities, remained congruous without trashing the integrity of every character. But even so, Le Bon suggested the band re-do every track, so Dry Cleaning hooked itself to a chassis of new tools: Dowse’s spaghetti-western guitars (“The Cute Things”), Buxton’s skittering 808s (“Blood”), and Shaw’s syrupy falsetto (“Secret Love”).
Alan Duggan and Dan Fox of Gilla Band even contributed production to “Blood” and “Evil Evil Idiot”—a collaboration that had been in the cards for a long time, Buxton reveals. “We’d only ever worked with John Parish as a producer. We went to [Duggan and Fox] to try and do something a bit more extreme. We said, ‘Don’t hold back.’” I say to the band that one of those collaborations, “Evil Evil Idiot,” is some of the most abrasive music they’ve made, what with Buxton’s clotted drumming, Dowse’s strangled guitar licks, and Shaw’s cold, cutting vocabulary (“I’ve got real muscly hands and sick legs / They hurt me, and the boils, the boils explode / And my teeth they are old and my shoes they aren’t the right ones”). “By that point, every recording experience we had was with people who make things sound nice or pretty,” Maynard says. “They served the songs in more traditional ways. But get Gilla Band to spin that, and they normalize noise and ugly in a way that’s beautiful.”
After some pre-production in London, Le Bon and the band holed up at Black Box in France. They had recorded Stumpwork in Rockfield in Wales—the same building they recorded New Long Leg in after isolating for two weeks in 2020. “We realized that it’s good to be completely isolated like that, once we traveled around and explored a few things,” Dowse says. “Once we picked Black Box and knew we were gonna work with Cate, we got to zoom in and just focus on [making a record]. You get the best out of the album.” The Stones influence got left at the door. “You don’t listen to other music, really, for weeks,” Maynard says. “You are just in that album bubble. If you’re commuting to the studio, you’ll be listening to your own music. Every day, you have a bit of a reset. But when you’re in the album, you are just in.”
“The fact that you don’t listen to music when you’re in the studio is because you’ve already been influenced by it,” Dowse says. “By the time you should be making it, you have to stop listening. And then the really good influences are in your brain. They’re deeply in there, you’re not even having to think about them anymore. You absorb them. If you’re in the studio and you’re listening to things, you’re going to copy it too much. If something’s influenced you enough over the period of demoing and writing, it should, by that point, be in your blood. Otherwise, it’s going to be too much of a hatchet job.”
And Secret Love is the most Dry Cleaning-sounding record yet. The music captures the contrasting parts of four people’s personalities. It’s visible first when the humongous melodies stretch out during the Sly and the Family Stone-inspired “Hit My Head All Day,” the song Dowse is most proud of. “The guys showed me [the song] and I didn’t have anything for it,” he remembers. “I had to find a space in it. The guitar stuff I was doing had to sit in a very specific place. I’m doing big, weird chords. It showed me, ‘Oh, you can do that. I am able to do that.’ I tried to pull out something that isn’t really my thing.” What we get is a dubby concoction that’s a little bit bizarre, a little bit psychedelic, and fucked like Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Shaw says Le Bon understood the four ingredients of Dry Cleaning’s music immediately. “We’re all quite stubborn in our own way,” she elaborates. “Maybe good stubborn. We’re all self-possessed and, to a lesser or greater extent, have figured ourselves out. I think she realized that nurturing those four strands is the way to make a good record with us.” Le Bon tells me she doesn’t believe in the “theatrical role of a producer”: “I’ve worked with producers who work that way, in the sense of ‘I’m right.’ Maybe when you’re green or you’re young, it serves a purpose. But my role is to just be really honest and be porous and let them get lost in the weeds in a way that is really fun for them.” She didn’t come to the table with any kind of impressive plan other than to listen to Dry Cleaning and try and figure out what the authenticity of the band is, highlight that, and inspire them by showing them how brilliant they are. “That’s what I would want from a producer,” she grins.
Le Bon went into each musician’s world, but Shaw was the toughest nut to crack. “I can be really private, especially when I’m writing,” the vocalist admits. “I can just be scurrying into my room and closing the door and writing all night and not showing it to any one kind of person. But she really persevered. She observed me, I think, for a little while. ‘How do you nurture this person?’ I didn’t explain it. I just probably looked really serious and didn’t make a lot of eye contact, clutching huge piles of paper, drifting around the studio in the background for a couple of days.” Le Bon had patience. “You have to have a dedication to listening to them and listening to what they want,” she says. “You have to continue to listen to them as things are coming into formation, so that you are adaptable to things changing. You’re trying to make space for everyone. When that happens, you can pull a few little threads at the end and it all seems to be coming into place.”
The first vocal take Shaw did for “Joy,” which featured “all these mad different bits and lots of really dense singing,” didn’t elicit a reaction out of Le Bon at all. Not immediately, at least. “She didn’t say anything. And then she made me do it again—rewrite it.” So Shaw rewrote it, and that’s the version that made the record. “Not having a plan other than to allow things to come into formation… there is a lot of discomfort that comes from that, which is a good thing,” Le Bon mentions. “I think there should be discomfort, there should be friction. I don’t think people should be scared of those things. When those things arise and you question them in a restorative way, it’s a gift.”
SHAW’S VOCAL MOVEMENTS GIVE FREEDOM to her bandmates. There’s more singing on Secret Love than on the band’s previous outings, but her rhythmic delivery allows anyone to do melody. That was obvious four years ago on “More Big Birds,” as Dowse plays the rhythm and Maynard plays the melody while Buxton holds onto a repetitive percussive pattern. No one’s role in this band is ever normal. “My favorite thing about Dry Cleaning is that whatever idea you bring, someone’s going to put it in different directions,” Maynard gushes. “Someone else’s taste will move it somewhere different. As a result, you get to go more extreme in your area. You have to worry about taste, but you don’t have to be so restrictive or put on a different hat, because you know that Tom’s guitar is going to put it that way and then Nick’s drums will put it that way, and then Flo will hear all of that and write lyrics to put it in a totally different direction.”
Le Bon calls Shaw’s sense of rhythm “incredible.” There’s a misconception that what the singer does is spontaneous, arriving into the world extempore. Le Bon argues that, while the genesis of Shaw’s lyrics comes “from sitting and writing off the cuff,” she’s “constantly changing things, listening to things, and readdressing things” about her craft, her phrasing, her delivery, everything. “What she does is she works so diligently, so meticulously, so thoughtfully,” Le Bon tells me. “She’s reacting to something, as well. You’re trying to bring things into formation at the same time, so that there’s space for all these characters. Tom’s guitar lines are insane. Nick’s bass lines are so lyrical. There’s all this space that is occupied, as well, and she’s dancing around it all in this really deft manner. The work is that it sounds effortless in the end.” It’s inspiring, everyone having so much room for each other.
Shaw may be Dry Cleaning’s primary lyricist, but her input musically is always left-field. According to her bandmates, she says these brilliant, intuitive things about the decisions being made. “You can accidentally make too much of the fact that she’s never been in a band before, because she is really musically astute,” Dowse says. “She’s got a really good ear for things. Obviously you hear it in the lyrics, but her sense of rhythm and where to put things, that’s quite a sophisticated thing to do. Musically she is usually the person that tells someone they’re out of tune. She looks at things from a really unique perspective.” Shaw, he continues, often gets obsessed with the intricacies of song structures. “What we call verses and choruses, [for her] they’re only vague attachments that help us identify things so we can structure it all. I don’t think they are middle eight sometimes, but they’re just a bit where we change what we’re doing in the song.”
Dry Cleaning played 18 shows with Nourished by Time in 2023. Watching him sing on tour every night, Shaw found a great friendship in Marcus Brown. “He has his own inner world, and that’s what drives his music,” she beams. “And I really related to that. He’s a dreamer and a fantasist. I feel the same way.” Shaw and Brown don’t make music that sounds the same, but they quickly bonded over the excitements and terrors of writing—about what it means to be perceived while sharing your innermost thoughts. When working out the hooks on Secret Love, Shaw imagined how Brown might sing over her band’s music. “I have my notes I like to sing, and he has his notes he likes to sing. And I think it’s good to try and break out of yourself a bit.”
Perception is about experience, Shaw says. The time between Dry Cleaning’s basement beginnings and playing to crowded venues in England was barely a couple of months. “There wasn’t a lot of time to decide how much to share,” Shaw recalls. “I’m a person who makes decisions really slowly. I care about details. In a way, deciding whether to share really personal things has been a whole journey for me.” Shaw’s not much of an open book. She guards her private world rather closely. But the worsening of the world around her, exacerbating an even greater feeling of isolation, made the act of being direct a lot more appealing. Attending a Joanna Sternberg gig at Union Chapel in London helped, too. “I was really struck by their writing and how revealing it is, but also how self-deprecating and how funny it is,” Shaw tells me. “I thought to myself, ‘I would like to offer that to the listener, as well’—that sense of catharsis I was getting from their music—and try to strike a better balance between my own inner-self and the person I am on stage and within the band.” She wanted to not only even herself up, but to blur the line between performer and person. She wanted her visibility to have meaning.
I find Dry Cleaning to be something of a revolutionary band, probably because it was born from joy—from four people wanting to make and share music with each other. There are songs on Secret Love that are obviously political (“Blood,” “Hit My Head All Day”) and songs that traffic in subtlety (“Joy,” “I Need You”). Shaw never censors or edits her writing. “I don’t plan to write things about geopolitical events. Sometimes you’re in the room and it’s time to write something and that happens to be what you’re thinking about,” she explains. “I feel a responsibility to share my thoughts. I feel a responsibility to be as direct as I can be. And, believe it or not, the absurd nature of my lyrics does feel like directness to me.” Shaw’s work is an intersection of storytelling and found things, cautionary tales through documentation. She’s a folk singer, and Dry Cleaning records are her texts for processing.
Shaw’s writing can sometimes sound like a riddle—scraps of thought that get glued together and called songs. She knows that. “All the things collected—and all the things I spontaneously do in the rehearsal room that end up in the songs—are just detritus in my brain,” she says. “The themes are what happen to be circling around.” Usually that’s one, two, maybe three separate ideas in a single song, all of which have strange links. But obeying the rules of how to “make good sense” doesn’t feel as immediate to her as piles and piles of thoughts do. Shaw isn’t one to operate on what an audience might want her to do, the “sense” they might want her to make. “I think the best thing you can do is just try to be brave in what you write,” she asserts, identifying that being brave and being honest is a scary thing, but it’s the role of an artist to make art with courage. “If what’s going on in your mind is still-lives of flowers, that’s fine. It’s an accurate record of who you are at that moment. The things I share are just the swirling topics that are going around my head, and I feel I can’t do more than that. I can’t do more than share what that is. Honesty makes me feel calm. Even if someone’s being honest but I think their views are absolutely repulsive, it’s good to know, isn’t it?”
The U.K.’s near-farcical complicity in the Palestinian genocide—spy planes, protester arrests, charlatan politicians, Palestine Action being designated as a terrorist group—has informed a lot of the resistance and confusion in Shaw’s lyrics, although “I Need You” came from the English version of The Apprentice (featuring computer businessman Alan Sugar). “It’s been on for donkey’s years, and it’s got all these quite insufferable people on it trying to run a market stall selling Scotch eggs in competition with each other,” she recounts. “He does the whole firing thing and everything, but the idea that now it’s got this link to something as disturbing as Trump, and the fact that he really became even more of a household name through that show—that it was almost a stepping stone to the presidency—there’s an absurdity to that journey because, in the U.K., The Apprentice is just really dumb. It feels kind of harmless.” There’s something disturbing about the threads of content that people used to laugh at now leading to real human suffering, Shaw gestures. “It seems so dystopian. It’s hard to see the edges of America spilling out everywhere.”
Shaw avoids the internet and its nonsense like the plague, yet the manosphere—misogynistic, male-supremacist forums preying on young people—has caught her attention, unavoidable and threatening as it is. “For all these pathetic blokes to not have enough respect for other human beings that they think it’s okay to take advantage of people in such a terrible way… I don’t know, it’s so bleak,” she says. “I don’t research it. I don’t go there. I don’t want to give it even the tiny amount of extra oxygen that my views would give it. I don’t know how they can bear it.” Shaw, after a few moments’ hesitation, sighs. “Maybe I take it too seriously, I don’t know, but I find it so violent. It makes me angry. We should be laughing at it.”
Humor is a crucial part of Dry Cleaning’s image. It’s not so much a coping mechanism as it is an engine. When New Long Leg came out, the world was fucked. Now, as Secret Love’s release day nears, it’s even more so. The follies get easier the more terrible everything becomes—meaning the comedy in Shaw’s writing, she says, never feels like an effort. “It always arises naturally. I think so many things in life are so absurd. Even the band itself is absurd. When we’re writing in rehearsal rooms and everything’s really loud but I’m really quiet, there’s a silliness to that. Talking next to a guitar amp is just totally doomed. There’s something insane about the whole thing, which certainly helps.” There’s laughter in the act of creating contrast. A line like “it’s useless to live” is poignant, and Shaw responds to it by saying something banal, like “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours,” but never on purpose. “That’s just a feature of the way I am, generally,” she reveals. “You know that feeling when you’re oversharing, or when you’re having a very serious conversation, and you get that urge to very quickly say something funny, to make sure no one takes you too seriously, or to make sure no one sees the real you for longer than two seconds? It’s like, when you tell someone something really dark and then you say, ‘Oh, but I’m fine.’ Everyone’s crying out for help, but the minute it becomes in touching distance, you want to run a mile from help.”
Shaw calls herself an organizer, a sorter. It’s what she finds joy in. She’s been that way for decades. “As a kid, I really loved to organize and collect things and identify ‘favorite things,’” she remembers. “I always had a huge drive to do that. I love the writing, but I really love the editing—the sculpting of things, the placement of things.” It’s easy to pull specific lines out of Shaw’s lyrics and draw attention to them—“I’m old young,” “maybe it’s time for men to clean for, like, 500 years,” and “we’ll build a cute, harmless world” are my favorites—but the thrill for her is in how things sit together. “I don’t get a lot out of the lines I write when they’re on their own,” she clarifies. “The context of things is really important to me. I care a lot about creating an effect where many, many, many complicated, huge, small, funny things are all flattened and put on a plane. Somehow, that calms me.” There’s something inherently humorous about that, isn’t there? Something playful and irreverent. Spoken-word has an intoxicating disobedience to it.
HERE YOU HAVE A BAND in incredible lock-step with each other—four players who communicate on a near-telepathic level. They’re a democratic unit, which means they argue about “songs that sound really weird for ages” and abandon ideas with regularity. “Everyone has a lot of autonomy, and it’s the most difficult thing about the band,” Shaw explains. “But it’s also the strength of the band. We’ve managed to hold it together. We all get bored quite easily. We always just want something new to happen—or maybe even a slight mischievousness. One of us always wants to fuck up the song. Like, ‘I’m gonna take this really gentle thing and play something really squelchy or loud over top of it.’ We each know that we’ve got a quarter of the control. It gets pulled in all kinds of directions all the time, and there’s not really anything anyone can do about it.” That’s what gives Dry Cleaning a tinge of unpredictability. There’s no lead. If you want to take the wheel and swerve it someplace, you can. The best thing everyone else can do is just react to it.
There’s a cord connecting the hearts of Stumpwork and Secret Love, taut between both albums’ closing tracks: “Icebergs” and “Joy.” A lasting image from the former (“stay interested in the world around you, keep the curiosity of a child if you can”) re-emerges in the airy, Guided by Voices-inundated castles of the latter (“it’s a horrorland destruction, don’t give up on being sweet”). After giving a talk at Virginia Tech, Shaw wandered through the university’s History of Food and Drink archive, discovering heaps of fragmented lyrical ephemera—like dairy union adverts from the Prohibition era. She pored over government propaganda encouraging people to drink more milk, hoovering up interesting phrases and funny snippets before subconsciously building Secret Love’s finale out of the esophaguses, enzymes, and anatomy in a “digestion dictionary.”
Shaw found sentences about vitamins and minerals and catalogued them. But her pessimism about the world—about the Palestinian genocide, technofascism, and Reform gaining widespread support in the U.K., despite (or perhaps because of) the party’s embrace of racism and right-wing drivel—still crept in. “Even thinking about the spread of AI in art and music, it was all depressing me—all the regressiveness that seems to be on fire all around us at the moment,” Shaw admits, quietly. “I thought, ‘I want to stoke my drive to feel positive, to promote softness and joy and compassion.’” Years ago, while undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a doctor told her about the “compassionate coach”—a kind, motivating inner-voice that you’re supposed to develop to combat alienation, self-deprecation.
“The voice in ‘Joy’ is motivated by that kind of character,” Shaw explains. “I find hope quite elusive, I would say, at the moment. The hopes and wishes in that song, they’re naive. They’re emphatic. But they’re also faint. They’re a little doomed, and I think that’s to do with the idea of just trying. It’s fucking hard. It’s that thing of, no matter what your intentions are, the truth of how you feel is imprinted on things, too. It’s not very pretty. You want to say, ‘Yeah, everyone’s got to be nice to each other and fuck all of this evil shit that’s going on.’ You want to say it’s about that, because that feels really simple, but it’s totally not. It’s a person struggling and trying anyway. It’s faltering.”
But the momentum comes back. Shaw’s optimism resists. Beneath a stockpile of clanging non-sequiturs, chopped-up YouTube comments, passerby conversations, and found tidbits lies something even greater than her ever-terrific lyrical subtext: a chemistry that out-clevers the misanthropy and nihilism that bind and torment. While Dry Cleaning was working on “My Soul / Half Pint,” “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit,” and “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)” at The Loft in 2024, Jeff Tweedy stopped by and made an observation about the band. “I love how you have your own language, and you communicate amongst yourselves in a way that no one else can understand,” he told the foursome. Maynard hadn’t noticed that about Dry Cleaning until Tweedy brought it up. “You have this communication where you’re all on the same page and maybe an outsider wouldn’t understand it, and communication seems like such a big part of being in the band,” he says. Buxton chimes in, affirming that the relationship is the band. “Sometimes it’s really difficult, both in making the music and having to be in each other’s pockets all the time,” he elaborates. “When you’re on tour, there’s no escape. You have to get on. It’s the defining thing about being in a band, really. I don’t understand bands that aren’t friends. I don’t know how that would work.”
Dry Cleaning’s core friendship is indeed a strange recipe—one that gets repeated during each press cycle, because the idea of four musicians who like hanging out with each other enchants journalists in mysterious ways. The foursome doesn’t seem to mind, though. “We have a good relationship, but I don’t really understand how your band would work if you didn’t have that—because you have to be with each other all the time, and you have to work with each other,” Buxton admits. “You have to compromise, and you have to understand each other. For me, the two things go hand in hand. I don’t want to be in a band where you weren’t really good friends.” It makes me think of a transmission from “The Cute Things”—“You are most certainly, to me, a total work of art”—and how the band’s harmony is dressed up within it.
I ask Le Bon what purpose a record like Secret Love serves in 2026. “As someone who tries to not be jaded about where music is heading, it’s authentic,” she responds. “It’s what excites me about bands—that they put a band together because they all really loved it.” It’s true: Dry Cleaning’s four players all had day jobs when they started doing this. Their sound then was the sound of poor people eager to see what might happen when they played instruments in tandem. There was no agenda about getting signed to a label, no scheme to play headline shows. The songs spawned out of this creative output they felt compelled to share with everyone else. It seemed so alive eight years ago, so present then. And it still does. “I can hear that,” Le Bon says, “and I can hear that when I’m with them.” It fascinates me even now, all these years into writing about music, that a group of brilliant people like this can start a band together and then a bunch of people can figure out how to love them. How absurd.
Secret Love is out 1/9 via 4AD.
Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
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