{"id":235329,"date":"2026-01-13T06:48:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T06:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/235329\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T06:48:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T06:48:22","slug":"dry-cleaning-is-a-total-work-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/235329\/","title":{"rendered":"Dry Cleaning is a total work of art"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s debut album, New Long Leg<\/a>, in the car. It drives my girl plumb batshit every time the grip of \u201cScratchcard Lanyard\u201d tightens while we merge into the demonic clutter of the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Much of the song\u2019s power comes from vocalist Florence Shaw\u2014a 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: \u201cDo everything and feel nothing.\u201d Her charisma heightens the cadence of her bandmates\u2019 already high pulse, which thrums but never thuds. There\u2019s all this rhythm in her delivery, even when she\u2019s 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 \u201cScratchcard Lanyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dry Cleaning lives and plays in London. \u201cArt rock\u201d gets overspent these days, but in this context, this band\u2019s material certainly has purchase. London, art rock\u2026 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\u2014think 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. \u201cEveryone has quite a strong philosophy on their playing and how they approach their instrument, how they want to play, and where their tastes are,\u201d drummer Nick Buxton says. \u201cThat makes up the core identity of who we are as players. But there\u2019s this element where you can be someone else for a bit, which is fun to do, but I think it only comes with confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In hindsight, the first two Dry Cleaning albums\u2014New Long Leg and Stumpwork\u2014were conservative, even minimalist, when it came to taking that specific kind of risk. \u201cI would think to myself, \u2018Oh, no, that\u2019s a bit silly. You can\u2019t do that,\u2019\u201d Buxton remembers. \u201cAnd I look back at that now and think, \u2018Oh, what the hell?\u2019\u201d The perspective of early-career distrust played a factor, he argues. \u201cYour 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spread your wings wide enough, though, and categorization itself becomes foolish. Take a press release\u2019s description of Dry Cleaning\u2019s new album, Secret Love: the music is characterized as \u201ccatalyzing the Reaganite paranoia of early \u201880s U.S. punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave, and pastoral fingerpicking.\u201d It\u2019s a mouthful and it doesn\u2019t even mention the influence of techno music on Buxton\u2014but it clears. Dry Cleaning turns rock and roll inside out with veritable technique, emotion, and pattern, all of which rings out from Dowse\u2019s Danelectro. Lewis Maynard\u2019s lyrical bass lines and Buxton\u2019s meat-and-potatoes kitwork remain in constant conversation with Shaw\u2019s psycho-sensational readings of global depravity (\u201cthe world is laughing at me, I am such a disaster\u201d) and human comedy (\u201cwhen I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery\u201d). 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 \u201csalt, sugar, vivid dish cloths, lava skylight mouth of hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Keith Richards mention leapt out at me. Stones records are dependable fantasies, much like Dry Cleaning records. \u201cI was thinking, aside from the heroin, \u2018What would Keith do?\u2019 It helped my playing a lot,\u201d Dowse says of his writing. \u201cWhen Keith gets going, and when the Stones get going, there\u2019s not a lot of fluctuation. It doesn\u2019t go up, nothing jumps out. But nothing dips down either.\u201d A Dry Cleaning song like \u201cMy Soul \/ Half Pint\u201d sounds like a party because the band is weaving through shades of rhythm. The decorative and immediate treble of \u201cCruise Ship Designer\u201d is like that, too: Shaw\u2019s slinky, humid pace gets capstoned by Dowse\u2019s restless eruption until the whole band reaches a zagging, dissonant crescendo. The song\u2019s a bottle half-buried in the sand but already uncorked. Once it starts going, it\u2019s just a few riffs. \u201cWhen you get to Sticky Fingers,\u201d Dowse starts, \u201call the stuff Keith\u2019s doing on \u2018Can\u2019t You Hear Me Knocking\u2019\u2026 he\u2019s got mistakes in it, and that\u2019s what I really try to do for myself now.\u201d Like Richards, Dowse gets a toasted vibe going and holds it, sketching parts but not fleshing them out all the way. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I ask Dowse if, like Richards, he is consciously working off lead and rhythm lines, or if he\u2019s instead adapting to the high and low range points of a song. He says that Dry Cleaning records are all about frequency. Shaw is \u201call the mids,\u201d sitting in the middle range. Maynard is the bass, and Buxton plays cymbals and kick drum that operate in separate registers. \u201cYou\u2019re trying to bring a different voice at different parts,\u201d Dowse explains. \u201cThere\u2019s something happening that Flo\u2019s doing, and I think to myself: there\u2019s room for another voice there.\u201d It\u2019s about weaving around each other, he explains, because \u201cone moment, you\u2019re in the driving seat, and then somebody else is. You have to make space.\u201d The guitar solo in \u201cMy Soul \/ Half Point\u201d is a good and necessary example of that, from a songwriter\u2019s perspective. \u201cSomething needed to happen there, and it had to be a different voice,\u201d Dowse says. \u201cYou could bring in another instrument, but I just wrote a solo for it.\u201d And it\u2019s a pedestrian-sounding solo, at that\u2014a predominantly solo version of what the chords were doing earlier in the song. But that\u2019s what makes it so good: Dry Cleaning extracts different shades from the same idea.<\/p>\n

Which is why the fingerpicked \u201cLet Me Grow and You\u2019ll See the Fruit\u201d is so satisfyingly circular\u2014repetitive in a way that evokes sample loops, drone inertia, house music rotations, the recoil of a drum delay. There\u2019s a little bit of that in \u201cCruise Ship Designer,\u201d as well, even though Dowse\u2019s guitar playing runs skronky in that one. Buxton says repetition means everything to him. \u201cIt\u2019s a less-is-more approach that allows you to make something of the change. When you\u2019re making a subtle change, you can put more emphasis into that having real meaning,\u201d he says. Maynard jumps in, mentioning that \u201cfrom the very start of this band, we were writing seven, eight-minute songs that were more krautrock-y. Then we\u2019d edit them down to pop song length, three minutes or so.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s first two EPs<\/a> instead. \u201cIt seemed like a good idea, to do a tour of that material,\u201d Dowse concedes. \u201cIt 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.\u201d 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. \u201cBy the time we actually got around to writing the record, we were just itching to write,\u201d Dowse continues. \u201cWe wanted to concentrate on it. We were still playing a lot, but we were ready to write.\u201d Maynard concurs with his bandmate: \u201cPlaying 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.\u201d Cave\u2019s stadium crowds were welcoming. Dowse says they weren\u2019t the dancing type, that there was never a mosh pit to get lost in, but that wasn\u2019t a bad thing. \u201cThey\u2019re there to watch and to listen, which really helps a support band where they don\u2019t know your music\u2014because they\u2019re quite engaging and they\u2019re quite respectful. That was nice, because we haven\u2019t done many support shows.\u201d<\/p>\n

In lieu of payment for playing Wilco\u2019s Solid Sound Festival in 2023, Dry Cleaning requested studio time at the alt-country icons\u2019 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 \u201cmagical place that puts people in each other\u2019s paths.\u201d 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\u2019d tracked in Dublin and London, which felt tactile to her in a way she hadn\u2019t heard their music sound before. \u201cI was really excited by that,\u201d Le Bon says. \u201cThere were these jagged edges to them and this kind of energy I was activated by.\u201d And in those songs, Dry Cleaning\u2019s four-person identity shone. \u201cYou take one out of the equation and it\u2019s no longer Dry Cleaning,\u201d Le Bon says. \u201cI really felt that tension and energy in the demos.\u201d 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\u2019s spaghetti-western guitars (\u201cThe Cute Things\u201d), Buxton\u2019s skittering 808s (\u201cBlood\u201d), and Shaw\u2019s syrupy falsetto (\u201cSecret Love\u201d).<\/p>\n

Alan Duggan and Dan Fox of Gilla Band even contributed production to \u201cBlood\u201d and \u201cEvil Evil Idiot\u201d\u2014a collaboration that had been in the cards for a long time, Buxton reveals. \u201cWe\u2019d 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, \u2018Don\u2019t hold back.\u2019\u201d I say to the band that one of those collaborations, \u201cEvil Evil Idiot,\u201d is some of the most abrasive music they\u2019ve made, what with Buxton\u2019s clotted drumming, Dowse\u2019s strangled guitar licks, and Shaw\u2019s cold, cutting vocabulary (\u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019t the right ones\u201d). \u201cBy that point, every recording experience we had was with people who make things sound nice or pretty,\u201d Maynard says. \u201cThey served the songs in more traditional ways. But get Gilla Band to spin that, and they normalize noise and ugly in a way that\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

After some pre-production in London, Le Bon and the band holed up at Black Box in France. They had recorded Stumpwork<\/a> in Rockfield in Wales\u2014the same building they recorded New Long Leg in after isolating for two weeks in 2020. \u201cWe realized that it\u2019s good to be completely isolated like that, once we traveled around and explored a few things,\u201d Dowse says. \u201cOnce 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.\u201d The Stones influence got left at the door. \u201cYou don\u2019t listen to other music, really, for weeks,\u201d Maynard says. \u201cYou are just in that album bubble. If you\u2019re commuting to the studio, you\u2019ll be listening to your own music. Every day, you have a bit of a reset. But when you\u2019re in the album, you are just in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that you don\u2019t listen to music when you\u2019re in the studio is because you\u2019ve already been influenced by it,\u201d Dowse says. \u201cBy the time you should be making it, you have to stop listening. And then the really good influences are in your brain. They\u2019re deeply in there, you\u2019re not even having to think about them anymore. You absorb them. If you\u2019re in the studio and you\u2019re listening to things, you\u2019re going to copy it too much. If something\u2019s influenced you enough over the period of demoing and writing, it should, by that point, be in your blood. Otherwise, it\u2019s going to be too much of a hatchet job.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Secret Love is the most Dry Cleaning-sounding record yet. The music captures the contrasting parts of four people\u2019s personalities. It\u2019s visible first when the humongous melodies stretch out during the Sly and the Family Stone-inspired \u201cHit My Head All Day,\u201d the song Dowse is most proud of. \u201cThe guys showed me [the song] and I didn\u2019t have anything for it,\u201d he remembers. \u201cI had to find a space in it. The guitar stuff I was doing had to sit in a very specific place. I\u2019m doing big, weird chords. It showed me, \u2018Oh, you can do that. I am able to do that.\u2019 I tried to pull out something that isn\u2019t really my thing.\u201d What we get is a dubby concoction that\u2019s a little bit bizarre, a little bit psychedelic, and fucked like Hendrix\u2019s \u201cStar-Spangled Banner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw says Le Bon understood the four ingredients of Dry Cleaning\u2019s music immediately. \u201cWe\u2019re all quite stubborn in our own way,\u201d she elaborates. \u201cMaybe good stubborn. We\u2019re 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.\u201d Le Bon tells me she doesn\u2019t believe in the \u201ctheatrical role of a producer\u201d: \u201cI\u2019ve worked with producers who work that way, in the sense of \u2018I\u2019m right.\u2019 Maybe when you\u2019re green or you\u2019re 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.\u201d She didn\u2019t 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. \u201cThat\u2019s what I would want from a producer,\u201d she grins.<\/p>\n

Le Bon went into each musician\u2019s world, but Shaw was the toughest nut to crack. \u201cI can be really private, especially when I\u2019m writing,\u201d the vocalist admits. \u201cI 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. \u2018How do you nurture this person?\u2019 I didn\u2019t explain it. I just probably looked really serious and didn\u2019t make a lot of eye contact, clutching huge piles of paper, drifting around the studio in the background for a couple of days.\u201d Le Bon had patience. \u201cYou have to have a dedication to listening to them and listening to what they want,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have to continue to listen to them as things are coming into formation, so that you are adaptable to things changing. You\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first vocal take Shaw did for \u201cJoy,\u201d which featured \u201call these mad different bits and lots of really dense singing,\u201d didn\u2019t elicit a reaction out of Le Bon at all. Not immediately, at least. \u201cShe didn\u2019t say anything. And then she made me do it again\u2014rewrite it.\u201d So Shaw rewrote it, and that\u2019s the version that made the record. \u201cNot having a plan other than to allow things to come into formation\u2026 there is a lot of discomfort that comes from that, which is a good thing,\u201d Le Bon mentions. \u201cI think there should be discomfort, there should be friction. I don\u2019t think people should be scared of those things. When those things arise and you question them in a restorative way, it\u2019s a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n

SHAW\u2019S VOCAL MOVEMENTS GIVE FREEDOM to her bandmates. There\u2019s more singing on Secret Love than on the band\u2019s previous outings, but her rhythmic delivery allows anyone to do melody. That was obvious four years ago on \u201cMore Big Birds,\u201d as Dowse plays the rhythm and Maynard plays the melody while Buxton holds onto a repetitive percussive pattern. No one\u2019s role in this band is ever normal. \u201cMy favorite thing about Dry Cleaning is that whatever idea you bring, someone\u2019s going to put it in different directions,\u201d Maynard gushes. \u201cSomeone else\u2019s 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\u2019t have to be so restrictive or put on a different hat, because you know that Tom\u2019s guitar is going to put it that way and then Nick\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Le Bon calls Shaw\u2019s sense of rhythm \u201cincredible.\u201d There\u2019s a misconception that what the singer does is spontaneous, arriving into the world extempore. Le Bon argues that, while the genesis of Shaw\u2019s lyrics comes \u201cfrom sitting and writing off the cuff,\u201d she\u2019s \u201cconstantly changing things, listening to things, and readdressing things\u201d about her craft, her phrasing, her delivery, everything. \u201cWhat she does is she works so diligently, so meticulously, so thoughtfully,\u201d Le Bon tells me. \u201cShe\u2019s reacting to something, as well. You\u2019re trying to bring things into formation at the same time, so that there\u2019s space for all these characters. Tom\u2019s guitar lines are insane. Nick\u2019s bass lines are so lyrical. There\u2019s all this space that is occupied, as well, and she\u2019s dancing around it all in this really deft manner. The work is that it sounds effortless in the end.\u201d It\u2019s inspiring, everyone having so much room for each other.<\/p>\n

Shaw may be Dry Cleaning\u2019s 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. \u201cYou can accidentally make too much of the fact that she\u2019s never been in a band before, because she is really musically astute,\u201d Dowse says. \u201cShe\u2019s 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\u2019s quite a sophisticated thing to do. Musically she is usually the person that tells someone they\u2019re out of tune. She looks at things from a really unique perspective.\u201d Shaw, he continues, often gets obsessed with the intricacies of song structures. \u201cWhat we call verses and choruses, [for her] they\u2019re only vague attachments that help us identify things so we can structure it all. I don\u2019t think they are middle eight sometimes, but they\u2019re just a bit where we change what we\u2019re doing in the song.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cHe has his own inner world, and that\u2019s what drives his music,\u201d she beams. \u201cAnd I really related to that. He\u2019s a dreamer and a fantasist. I feel the same way.\u201d Shaw and Brown don\u2019t make music that sounds the same, but they quickly bonded over the excitements and terrors of writing\u2014about 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\u2019s music. \u201cI have my notes I like to sing, and he has his notes he likes to sing. And I think it\u2019s good to try and break out of yourself a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perception is about experience, Shaw says. The time between Dry Cleaning\u2019s basement beginnings and playing to crowded venues in England was barely a couple of months. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a lot of time to decide how much to share,\u201d Shaw recalls. \u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d Shaw\u2019s 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. \u201cI was really struck by their writing and how revealing it is, but also how self-deprecating and how funny it is,\u201d Shaw tells me. \u201cI thought to myself, \u2018I would like to offer that to the listener, as well\u2019\u2014that sense of catharsis I was getting from their music\u2014and try to strike a better balance between my own inner-self and the person I am on stage and within the band.\u201d She wanted to not only even herself up, but to blur the line between performer and person. She wanted her visibility to have meaning.<\/p>\n

I find Dry Cleaning to be something of a revolutionary band, probably because it was born from joy\u2014from four people wanting to make and share music with each other. There are songs on Secret Love that are obviously political (\u201cBlood,\u201d \u201cHit My Head All Day\u201d) and songs that traffic in subtlety (\u201cJoy,\u201d \u201cI Need You\u201d). Shaw never censors or edits her writing. \u201cI don\u2019t plan to write things about geopolitical events. Sometimes you\u2019re in the room and it\u2019s time to write something and that happens to be what you\u2019re thinking about,\u201d she explains. \u201cI 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.\u201d Shaw\u2019s work is an intersection of storytelling and found things, cautionary tales through documentation. She\u2019s a folk singer, and Dry Cleaning records are her texts for processing.<\/p>\n

Shaw\u2019s writing can sometimes sound like a riddle\u2014scraps of thought that get glued together and called songs. She knows that. \u201cAll the things collected\u2014and all the things I spontaneously do in the rehearsal room that end up in the songs\u2014are just detritus in my brain,\u201d she says. \u201cThe themes are what happen to be circling around.\u201d Usually that\u2019s one, two, maybe three separate ideas in a single song, all of which have strange links. But obeying the rules of how to \u201cmake good sense\u201d doesn\u2019t feel as immediate to her as piles and piles of thoughts do. Shaw isn\u2019t one to operate on what an audience might want her to do, the \u201csense\u201d they might want her to make. \u201cI think the best thing you can do is just try to be brave in what you write,\u201d she asserts, identifying that being brave and being honest is a scary thing, but it\u2019s the role of an artist to make art with courage. \u201cIf what\u2019s going on in your mind is still-lives of flowers, that\u2019s fine. It\u2019s 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\u2019t do more than that. I can\u2019t do more than share what that is. Honesty makes me feel calm. Even if someone\u2019s being honest but I think their views are absolutely repulsive, it\u2019s good to know, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.K.\u2019s near-farcical complicity in the Palestinian genocide\u2014spy planes, protester arrests, charlatan politicians, Palestine Action being designated as a terrorist group\u2014has informed a lot of the resistance and confusion in Shaw\u2019s lyrics, although \u201cI Need You\u201d came from the English version of The Apprentice (featuring computer businessman Alan Sugar). \u201cIt\u2019s been on for donkey\u2019s years, and it\u2019s got all these quite insufferable people on it trying to run a market stall selling Scotch eggs in competition with each other,\u201d she recounts. \u201cHe does the whole firing thing and everything, but the idea that now it\u2019s 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\u2014that it was almost a stepping stone to the presidency\u2014there\u2019s an absurdity to that journey because, in the U.K., The Apprentice is just really dumb. It feels kind of harmless.\u201d There\u2019s something disturbing about the threads of content that people used to laugh at now leading to real human suffering, Shaw gestures. \u201cIt seems so dystopian. It\u2019s hard to see the edges of America spilling out everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw avoids the internet and its nonsense like the plague, yet the manosphere\u2014misogynistic, male-supremacist forums preying on young people\u2014has caught her attention, unavoidable and threatening as it is. \u201cFor all these pathetic blokes to not have enough respect for other human beings that they think it\u2019s okay to take advantage of people in such a terrible way\u2026 I don\u2019t know, it\u2019s so bleak,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t research it. I don\u2019t go there. I don\u2019t want to give it even the tiny amount of extra oxygen that my views would give it. I don\u2019t know how they can bear it.\u201d Shaw, after a few moments\u2019 hesitation, sighs. \u201cMaybe I take it too seriously, I don\u2019t know, but I find it so violent. It makes me angry. We should be laughing at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humor is a crucial part of Dry Cleaning\u2019s image. It\u2019s 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\u2019s release day nears, it\u2019s even more so. The follies get easier the more terrible everything becomes\u2014meaning the comedy in Shaw\u2019s writing, she says, never feels like an effort. \u201cIt always arises naturally. I think so many things in life are so absurd. Even the band itself is absurd. When we\u2019re writing in rehearsal rooms and everything\u2019s really loud but I\u2019m really quiet, there\u2019s a silliness to that. Talking next to a guitar amp is just totally doomed. There\u2019s something insane about the whole thing, which certainly helps.\u201d There\u2019s laughter in the act of creating contrast. A line like \u201cit\u2019s useless to live\u201d is poignant, and Shaw responds to it by saying something banal, like \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours,\u201d but never on purpose. \u201cThat\u2019s just a feature of the way I am, generally,\u201d she reveals. \u201cYou know that feeling when you\u2019re oversharing, or when you\u2019re 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\u2019s like, when you tell someone something really dark and then you say, \u2018Oh, but I\u2019m fine.\u2019 Everyone\u2019s crying out for help, but the minute it becomes in touching distance, you want to run a mile from help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw calls herself an organizer, a sorter. It\u2019s what she finds joy in. She\u2019s been that way for decades. \u201cAs a kid, I really loved to organize and collect things and identify \u2018favorite things,\u2019\u201d she remembers. \u201cI always had a huge drive to do that. I love the writing, but I really love the editing\u2014the sculpting of things, the placement of things.\u201d It\u2019s easy to pull specific lines out of Shaw\u2019s lyrics and draw attention to them\u2014\u201cI\u2019m old young,\u201d \u201cmaybe it\u2019s time for men to clean for, like, 500 years,\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019ll build a cute, harmless world\u201d are my favorites\u2014but the thrill for her is in how things sit together. \u201cI don\u2019t get a lot out of the lines I write when they\u2019re on their own,\u201d she clarifies. \u201cThe 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.\u201d There\u2019s something inherently humorous about that, isn\u2019t there? Something playful and irreverent. Spoken-word has an intoxicating disobedience to it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

HERE YOU HAVE A BAND in incredible lock-step with each other\u2014four players who communicate on a near-telepathic level. They\u2019re a democratic unit, which means they argue about \u201csongs that sound really weird for ages\u201d and abandon ideas with regularity. \u201cEveryone has a lot of autonomy, and it\u2019s the most difficult thing about the band,\u201d Shaw explains. \u201cBut it\u2019s also the strength of the band. We\u2019ve managed to hold it together. We all get bored quite easily. We always just want something new to happen\u2014or maybe even a slight mischievousness. One of us always wants to fuck up the song. Like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna take this really gentle thing and play something really squelchy or loud over top of it.\u2019 We each know that we\u2019ve got a quarter of the control. It gets pulled in all kinds of directions all the time, and there\u2019s not really anything anyone can do about it.\u201d That\u2019s what gives Dry Cleaning a tinge of unpredictability. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a cord connecting the hearts of Stumpwork and Secret Love, taut between both albums\u2019 closing tracks: \u201cIcebergs\u201d and \u201cJoy.\u201d A lasting image from the former (\u201cstay interested in the world around you, keep the curiosity of a child if you can\u201d) re-emerges in the airy, Guided by Voices-inundated castles of the latter (\u201cit\u2019s a horrorland destruction, don\u2019t give up on being sweet\u201d). After giving a talk at Virginia Tech, Shaw wandered through the university\u2019s History of Food and Drink archive, discovering heaps of fragmented lyrical ephemera\u2014like 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\u2019s finale out of the esophaguses, enzymes, and anatomy in a \u201cdigestion dictionary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw found sentences about vitamins and minerals and catalogued them. But her pessimism about the world\u2014about the Palestinian genocide, technofascism, and Reform gaining widespread support in the U.K., despite (or perhaps because of) the party\u2019s embrace of racism and right-wing drivel\u2014still crept in. \u201cEven thinking about the spread of AI in art and music, it was all depressing me\u2014all the regressiveness that seems to be on fire all around us at the moment,\u201d Shaw admits, quietly. \u201cI thought, \u2018I want to stoke my drive to feel positive, to promote softness and joy and compassion.\u2019\u201d Years ago, while undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a doctor told her about the \u201ccompassionate coach\u201d\u2014a kind, motivating inner-voice that you\u2019re supposed to develop to combat alienation, self-deprecation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe voice in \u2018Joy\u2019 is motivated by that kind of character,\u201d Shaw explains. \u201cI find hope quite elusive, I would say, at the moment. The hopes and wishes in that song, they\u2019re naive. They\u2019re emphatic. But they\u2019re also faint. They\u2019re a little doomed, and I think that\u2019s to do with the idea of just trying. It\u2019s fucking hard. It\u2019s that thing of, no matter what your intentions are, the truth of how you feel is imprinted on things, too. It\u2019s not very pretty. You want to say, \u2018Yeah, everyone\u2019s got to be nice to each other and fuck all of this evil shit that\u2019s going on.\u2019 You want to say it\u2019s about that, because that feels really simple, but it\u2019s totally not. It\u2019s a person struggling and trying anyway. It\u2019s faltering.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the momentum comes back. Shaw\u2019s 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 \u201cMy Soul \/ Half Pint,\u201d \u201cLet Me Grow and You\u2019ll See the Fruit,\u201d and \u201cSecret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)\u201d at The Loft in 2024, Jeff Tweedy stopped by and made an observation about the band. \u201cI love how you have your own language, and you communicate amongst yourselves in a way that no one else can understand,\u201d he told the foursome. Maynard hadn\u2019t noticed that about Dry Cleaning until Tweedy brought it up. \u201cYou have this communication where you\u2019re all on the same page and maybe an outsider wouldn\u2019t understand it, and communication seems like such a big part of being in the band,\u201d he says. Buxton chimes in, affirming that the relationship is the band. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s really difficult, both in making the music and having to be in each other\u2019s pockets all the time,\u201d he elaborates. \u201cWhen you\u2019re on tour, there\u2019s no escape. You have to get on. It\u2019s the defining thing about being in a band, really. I don\u2019t understand bands that aren\u2019t friends. I don\u2019t know how that would work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dry Cleaning\u2019s core friendship is indeed a strange recipe\u2014one 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\u2019t seem to mind, though. \u201cWe have a good relationship, but I don\u2019t really understand how your band would work if you didn\u2019t have that\u2014because you have to be with each other all the time, and you have to work with each other,\u201d Buxton admits. \u201cYou have to compromise, and you have to understand each other. For me, the two things go hand in hand. I don\u2019t want to be in a band where you weren\u2019t really good friends.\u201d It makes me think of a transmission from \u201cThe Cute Things\u201d\u2014\u201cYou are most certainly, to me, a total work of art\u201d\u2014and how the band\u2019s harmony is dressed up within it.<\/p>\n

I ask Le Bon what purpose a record like Secret Love serves in 2026. \u201cAs someone who tries to not be jaded about where music is heading, it\u2019s authentic,\u201d she responds. \u201cIt\u2019s what excites me about bands\u2014that they put a band together because they all really loved it.\u201d It\u2019s true: Dry Cleaning\u2019s 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. \u201cI can hear that,\u201d Le Bon says, \u201cand I can hear that when I\u2019m with them.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Secret Love is out 1\/9 via 4AD.<\/p>\n

Matt Mitchell is Paste\u2018s editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If I may borrow a phrase from Lisa Robinson, Dry Cleaning is one of those bands with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":{"0":"post-235329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}