Dry Cleaning are even more themselves on Secret Love

With talker and singer Florence Shaw’s absurdist imagery capturing feelings of modern unease and pointlessness more memorably than any of her peers. While that style of sprechgesang has become less fashionable among new bands, Dry Cleaning continue to refine and perfect their version of it, producing new gems and weird insights along the way.

What stops that sound from becoming tired in Dry Cleaning’s hands is the unusual warmth that they bring to it. Part of that stems from their steadfast silliness. “Cruise Ship Designer”, the second track into their new album, is a dramatic monologue with a speaker who ‘doesn’t personally like’ designing cruise ships, but is “making the best of a bad situation.” With its bright, Stonesy backing, the track starts as a straightforwardly upbeat paean to big boats and positive thinking: “Designing cruisers is, for me, a privilege / And a lesson.” Then growls of detuned guitar undo the cheerful mood, before the track ends with Shaw’s perfectly on-the-noise closing statement: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work.”

Another striking aspect of Dry Cleaning’s sound is the closeness of the production: Shaw’s untreated voice speaks directly into your ear, and Tom Dowse’s layered guitars are bright and upfront, doing so much melodic and textural work that they seem to wrap around and fill the space in every song. There’s also a kind of contained scrappiness to Dowse’s guitar, often threatening to veer off key, but always coming back to melody, which brings an edge of dissonance without being wholly abrasive or confrontational – even on the particularly evil-sounding “Evil Evil Idiot”, a Boris-tinged slow-burner about burning your food.

Elsewhere, Secret Love contains some of Dry Cleaning’s prettiest moments, even as the lyrics are at their most dire. “Blood” flirts unexpectedly with bossanova, while Shaw tells us that “people are worse than you think.” “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”, with its In Rainbows-esque arpeggios and ruminative saxophone, veers closer to sheer beauty than anything else that Dry Cleaning have done, while its lyrics balance plainspoken expressions of alienation and desperation–”Every day I’m a shell”, “I dearly want to make friends”– with hopefulness and serenity - "A whole day to spend / No limit, no restriction, no interruption.” It’s a highlight of the album, and one of Dry Cleaning’s best. And it contains a line that will circle in my head for a while, unnervingly but hilariously summing up the feeling of weirdness-within-the-mundane, of everyday anxieties, that is Dry Cleaning’s stock-in-trade: “I constantly think there are spiders on me and around me. I enjoyed your gig, even though I thought there were spiders all over me.”