Midway through “Evil Evil Idiot,” Florence Shaw delivers a line that stopped me: “There have been malicious studies that discredited heavily carbonised foods as carcinogenic / But it didn’t put me off / One needs to enjoy life.” It’s absurd. It’s defiant. And against sludgy guitars that mark the heaviest moment Dry Cleaning have recorded, it feels completely real. I couldn’t tell you what the song is about. I’m not sure Shaw could either. That uncertainty is the point. You don’t decode Dry Cleaning. You sit inside their logic until it starts to make sense.

The sprechgesang wave that reshaped British post-punk keeps expanding—Sleaford Mods, Black Country, New Road, Yard Act, Squid, Self Esteem. Dry Cleaning emerged from this scene but never fit inside it. Where Isaac Wood delivered feverish monologues and James Smith ranted about national decline, Shaw stayed still. Her calm against the noise was the point. It still is.

Secret Love is their third album and first without producer John Parish. Cate Le Bon came on after convincing the band to scrap close to twenty demos and start over. They cut the tracklist to eleven songs and re-recorded everything at Black Box Studios in France’s Loire Valley. The result plays like a gallery exhibition: eleven discrete works, each self-contained, each demanding its own terms. You don’t shuffle a Dry Cleaning record. You walk through it.

Opener “Hit My Head All Day” establishes the architecture. Nick Buxton’s drums and Lewis Maynard’s bass lock into a machine-driven groove while Tom Dowse’s guitar ebbs and flows—angular, ethereal. Shaw recites images of manipulation without raising her voice. The band escalates; she stays fixed. “Cruise Ship Designer” operates as its own short film. Shaw inhabits a luxury liner architect who admits he doesn’t personally like cruises but “needs to serve a useful purpose.” The line “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work” plays as meta-commentary. Shaw doesn’t acknowledge it. “My Soul / Half Pint” rides a deceptively bright riff, but Shaw’s narrator is seething. She finds cleaning “demeaning,” proposes men handle it “for 500 years,” then retreats into counting: “19,000, 20,000 I count all day long… it relaxes me.” Resentment and coping mechanism, left to coexist.

Side two turns heavier. “Blood” places Shaw in an underground bunker with a “computer-controlled flying bomb,” her voice flat against lines like “Schools and hospitals and homes / People are worse than you’d think.” Then “Evil Evil Idiot,” and the pretty shimmer drops away. The band brought these tracks to Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox in Dublin, and you can hear the damage—guitars turned raw and sludgy, drums pushed toward destruction. Shaw mounts her deadpan defense of burnt food, pivots into anxieties about aging teeth and wrong shoes. The tonal whiplash is deliberate.

Le Bon pushed Shaw to actually sing on tracks like the title cut and “I Need You.” Shaw told Rolling Stone the shift felt vulnerable, close to oversharing. “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” contains the album’s most unguarded line: “The world is laughing at me / I am such a disaster.” From a vocalist whose default is wry observation, the admission opens a crack.

Dry Cleaning formed when all four members were in their thirties, after years building furniture, lecturing, and working in social care. They were friends before they were a band, and it shows. The four of them build these strange rooms together. Secret Love doesn’t abandon what came before, but it no longer holds everything at the same distance. Shaw is still assembling mosaics from overheard fragments and domestic absurdities.

She’s just standing closer to them now.

pre order Secret Love by Dry Cleaning HERE