“I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” Florence Shaw, the singular force and voice that emerged during the UK Sprechsegang boom of the pre-COVID years, wryly intones in the final moments of “Crusie Ship Designer.” A jovial and jangly song on the band’s–featuring guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton–career-defining third album Secret Love, it simultaneously pokes fun at a seemingly trivial occupation while also being a rather depressing character study of a person who is passionate about their vocation despite having to work in a realm that isn’t exactly fulfilling but helps them feel as though they “serve a useful purpose” and will help them get “a place in society.” Her words, delivered in the most commanding spoken cadence, cut through the buoyancy of the arrangements. They’ll have you pause what you’re doing to pore over every detail for double meanings or, as is the case with these songs, take in her frankness on a myriad of topics.

That’s the magic, lyrically, of Dry Cleaning. On the surface, you’d think Shaw’s lyrics and stories are purely motivated by surreal comedy; however, these songs are deeply emotive and affecting in how she articulates universal feelings of loneliness, hopelessness at the state of the world and trying to stay positive. Musically, the band present the most varied and tonally interesting dynamic of styles across the eleven songs. You sense everything from Television, XTC, Suicide, Pentangle and, of course, there are flashes of its producer Cate Le Bon’s electrifying sonic personality illuminating moments within these brilliantly developed worlds.

Speaking about everything from the experience of making Secret Love, Dry Cleaning’s irresistible third studio album, released via 4AD earlier this month, lyricist and vocalist Florence Shaw and guitarist Tom Dowse are incredibly genial and warm to chat with. While both reflect thoughtfully and openly about how they’ve developed individually and within the band unit, and finally making an album in a way they always wanted it to sound, they’re both exceptionally warm and veer towards laughter and humour. That balance – fun and considered – is an overarching, and immensely endearing, aspect to Dry Cleaning’s musical identity, going all the way back to the band’s early EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, both released in 2018. Now three albums in, and the guidance of Le Bon in the studio (of which there were many across several cities) Dry Cleaning sound even more assured and artistically fulfilled on what is unquestionably their most meaningful and magical album.

Florence Shaw and Tom Dowse spoke to Northern Transmissions about working with Cate Le Bon and one-half of Gilla Band on Secret Love, finally incorporating elements in the songs they’ve wanted to explore for years, and reflecting on what Dry Cleaning’s three albums mean to them today.

Northern Transmissions: Congratulations on Secret Love, I’ve absolutely loved spending time with it over the last while. It came out a little while ago. How has it been seeing people’s reactions to it? Was there anything you were surprised that people were really drawn to?

Florence Shaw: Very chuffed at the reception because you really don’t know how it’ll go. Releasing things is such unknown territory. You never know if people are going to care at all, or if people might hate it. It’s a total mystery. I find it a bit of a psychic nightmare releasing music because there’s such a massive build-up to it. People around us get very excited, but I just go a bit numb. Then, you suddenly hear a lot in one big go about something you made over a long period of time. Some of it’s positive, some of it’s negative. I’ve really struggled to take it in in any helpful way! What’s really nice is that people’s favorites on the record seem to be quite diverse. People like all of the songs, which is amazing because that’s not always the case. Sometimes you have a quieter song or something a bit more low-key that falls by the wayside a bit, and people don’t listen to it as much, and that’s fine, but it does seem like this time people are zoning in on every track and liking it for a different reason. Which is really neat.

NT: I had that when I listened to the album for the first time. It took me ages to get to track two because I kept playing “Hit My Head All Day”. I couldn’t get past that song because I loved it so much. The songs all have such a great individual sense of character. I know your songwriting process begins and progresses with a lot of jamming sessions with you feeding off each other’s ideas and energy. I was wondering how, if at all, the sessions for Secret Love differed from New Long Leg or Stumpwork?

Tom Dowse: They differed in the sense that the songs had a longer demoing period and a much better quality demoing period. For instance, what we sent to Cate Le Bon, we were leaving them on the table so that we could use them as the album. She might cut them up or add things to them, but she was very adamant that we should re-record them. So, there was that whole period of time where we started at The Loft in Chicago, and some songs were quite developed, other things weren’t so developed. We came away with six really nice demos from that session. That was about a year before we recorded the album. That whole period of time of going to different studios and working with Gilla Band, or half of Gilla Band in Dublin, allowed us to explore songs and flesh them out and stretch them a bit more before we even got to talk to Cate.

Then, you’re bringing in someone of Cate’s calibre to guide that forward, as well. It felt like we were spending longer exploring what the songs were about; sometimes doing different versions of them, as well, to see what that would be like. I think, as a result of that, it means that this album is more cohesive. That’s the only difference in the jamming. The actual core jamming was exactly the same as always. It’s just us. We would just be jamming for a couple of hours. There’s never any pressure on the jamming, but, interestingly, the process we took it into with the demoing was really good. That was different.

Florence Shaw: Yeah, it was thorough, very thorough.

NT: Tom, you mentioned there that you feel this album is very cohesive; there’s definitely a unifying foundation across the songs in spite of the tonal variety across them. That’s interesting to me because there were so many different locations where you recorded from London, France, Chicago and Dublin. As well as that, there were a few different collaborators involved, such as Danie Fox and Alan Duggan, as well as Cate Le Bon. How did you find that variety impacted the process? With each new place, did that feel like a new start to a particular block of songs that you were working on and because of that, always made you reinvigorated and excited to record.

Florence Shaw: Yeah, it was a catalyst, wasn’t it really? The changes are like fuel, and they make you do different things. That’s what appealed to us about it; it provokes you, and it squeezes weird ideas out of you by being in different places. It fueled the whole thing, didn’t it?

Tom Dowse: Yeah, for sure. I even think that could be zoned even further down to the studio itself, the actual room you’re in. It can literally be the psycho-geography of the room itself. Being in Chicago at The Loft, you had to accept that for what it was, as in it was this is an amazing experience. I think that fed into the songs because we were quite confident in how we were playing. Things like “The Cute Things” came from that, “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” came from that, and “My Soul / Half Pint” came from that. There’s a bit of bounce and a bit of energy in those ones. Then, by the time we got to Dublin, it was in the deep winter. Daniel’s got a very, how can we say, interesting approach to heating. We were kind of freezing the whole time, but it was from that came “Blood”, “Evil Evil Idiot”, and “Sliced By a Fingernail”, which actually isn’t on the album, but is coming after; they have more of an edge to them. A more brutal sound, the industrial sound.

NT: When I saw that you had worked with Cate Le Bon on this album, I was so excited because on paper, the two of you are such a perfect pairing, in my mind. Listening to the album, I’m delighted to say that my imagined version of how the songs would sound didn’t come close to how good they turned out. I love how on the album, some of her musical sensibility is definitely there, but it’s still very much a Dry Cleaning album. I’d love to hear about her process and methods as a producer that you enjoyed and maybe didn’t expect.

Florence Shaw: Cate spent a lot of time with each of us individually. She really zoned in on our personalities, and when she was talking to each of us, it didn’t seem like she often referenced the song as a whole; she understood very quickly that we’re all very focused on our parts because we have a lot of autonomy over them. We all write all of our own parts, and she read that really quickly and proceeded with that in mind. And so, she spent a long time with each of us, quite a lot actually, talking about what we were doing and setting us little challenges, I suppose. That was really nice, and I think we all really benefited a huge amount from that. That was just very clever of her to read that that’s what we’re like as a band so quickly. Before working with her, we’d only really met her once before, but only for like 15 minutes. It was clever of her to read that so quickly and to proceed in that way.

Also, she was obviously great to do vocals with. She was amazing because she really understands how psychological it can be, but she’s also tough, and if something’s not quite landing, she’ll say so straight away and very plainly, which was great. I love that. I love the directness of that. I find vagueness really disturbing!

NT: I wanted to ask about your vocals on this album because I really enjoyed how there’s so much variety in your vocals throughout this album. Did that come from having a few years of recording or touring to help you grow into a more confident vocalist? Had you been excited to try new things with your voice and your delivery for a while?

Florence Shaw: Primarily, I started singing more purely out of curiosity. I always think it’s like the way you dress changes over time. You don’t overnight completely change your look, and you suddenly realize, when you look back at pictures of yourself from a year ago, and go, ‘Oh, I dress really differently now. That’s strange!’ Or, the way you do your makeup changes over time. It’s not often sudden. I feel my singing is a little bit like that. Then, also, it can sometimes happen as a bit of a reaction to what you were doing before you get bored with yourself, but only in the way that you do about, well, I certainly do about almost everything about myself! I’ll just be like, ‘Oh, shut up!’, you know what I mean? Listening to yourself talk, and you just wince. It’s exactly that. That’s what drives you to evolve things, isn’t it? All kinds of things, too. It’s no different with vocals. It’s just fun to do things that you don’t feel that competent at. I enjoy the beginner’s vibe of trying things. I feel like, creatively, I’m a very developed person. I’ve studied things like drawing, and I suppose, at this point, experience-wise, things like spoken word enough that I feel quite comfortable doing those things. With that foundation, it’s fun to do something that you don’t really know how to do at all. Those two things combined, I find that quite fun. It’s like using a massive pen to draw something. It’s difficult all of a sudden. That’s like singing words suddenly interrupts my skill at it, and it makes it way harder, but I think that’s good.

It’s fun for me, and it also gives things a different quality than what they’ve had before. Often, the way I perform is, in its own way, quite confident. I wanted something less confident-sounding. I guess also, the room where we write, oftentimes, you can’t really hear the vocals because of just, you know, physics, because my vocal is quiet and the instruments are loud. You can’t always hear it, but at the same time, that gives you a sense of privacy to try things. Often, I’d be doing a vocal straight into a phone, with my mouth right up against the receiver or whatever you call it. You’d hear the music, but the vocal would be upfront, and that’s really the only way to get a good recording in a rehearsal room of the vocal and the music. So, I’d just be doing it into a phone, but no one can really hear it. That’s good because then you just try things. You’re not afraid of everyone hearing it. I just go home and listen to it and go like, ‘Well, that’s so bad,’ and delete it or go, ‘Actually, I quite like that,’ and then share it with the guys. There were a few different things behind it. Obviously, Cate was a great person to actualize all of that with. All of those things were already decided before we started working with her. I think people have thought maybe that she was pushing me to sing, but I was already doing that when we shared the demos with her. She really just tied a bow around the whole thing and really encouraged me in the moment of actual performance.

NT: Amazing. Tom, on a similar level from a musical and tonal kind of standpoint, I read that you said a version of Pentangle's “Wedding Dress” served as an inspiration to “Let Me Grow…”

Tom Dowse: Yeah, it's specifically the live version because the drummer on that recording really reminds me of the way Nick [Buxton] drums, which is that he’s always behind the beat, but he's very motorik. Kind of like house music. It's not aggressive, but there's always a weird tension between him and me, musically, because I'm always wanting to go at the front of the beat in a punk way, it’s like an urgent thing. Whereas he's always pulling it back, and I think he creates a really nice tension. That's the live version of “Wedding Dress”, which is really good because the drums start at first, and it's sort of like a tambourine, as well. That's a very Nick thing to do.

I do a lot of finger-picking guitar when I'm at home. I spend a lot of time, when I’ at home, playing finger-picked, classical guitar. I'm not necessarily any good at it, but I do it to relax. It’s quite a transportative thing for me to do. I've tried to bring it into Dry Cleaning before, but a lot of the scale ranges are quite medieval-sounding, and it doesn't really work! It sounds really weird. I started looking at Pentangle, and I think that combination of a slight bit of bounciness to the rhythm and a little bit of English ‘70s folk revival, it seemed to gel it a bit more. For some reason, “Let Me Grow…” really worked. It's a bit of a lightning bolt moment because, as you say about different characters, I was quite keen to try different things on this [album] as well, guitar-wise. I think we all felt the same about everything we were doing. We all wanted to show different sides of ourselves a bit more.

NT: What were some of the things, maybe after you finished the last tour, before even starting to write these songs, that you had been ruminating on that you wanted to incorporate into these songs? Like what you were saying there with wanting to bring in more finger-picking, Tom.

Tom Dowse: I would say that they're new for Dry Cleaning, but they're not to us. It's almost like we've been itching to make a record like this since the beginning. One that had all of our different influences in it. It's just that you can only make the record that you're making at the time. You can only try to do your best to make that record. If those things don't come up, then by the time you make your third one, you’ve had quite a lot of chances to write different things, maybe there's more time or you just eventually manage to get around to it.

NT: Tom, I read that your favorite line from the album is “I don’t like to clean / I find cleaning demeaning” from “My Soul / Half Pint”. What was it about that line you loved so much?

Tom Dowse: It just stuck the line that stuck was in my head the most because when I first heard it, it was a bit of a light bulb moment where you're sort of like, ‘We’re going to be rich!’ What I like about it, actually, is that it captures a lot of what I really like about Flo’s lyrics, in general. There are so many ways you can read them or there are so many layers to them because they're funny for a start, but there's always a bit of bite to it. I always think that Flo is a punk without being a punk, if you know what I mean. There's a kind of ‘Fuck you’ to them, but not in a sort of, like I always say, that you expect punk music to be provocative and rebellious, but because of that, you don't really find it there as often, so I think it's much more provocative to find it in someone like Flo.

A lyric like that, that makes you laugh, but it’s got a really strong feminist drive to it. If you’re a man who finds that uncomfortable, a line like, “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like 500 years,” if that makes you uncomfortable, then I think that’s a job done as a lyricist, surely. And certainly, for a band that’s trying to make people feel uncomfortable about that.

NT: Of course. Florence, from your experience making the album, was there something that Tom did in the studio or a guitar line that he played that you were really excited by the first time you heard it?

Florence Shaw: So many things! I get that feeling all the time. That feeling is the thing that results in me having ideas because a lot of times I'm writing in response to what the guys are playing, even if it’s a 10-second delay or something, because I'm listening in the room to them inventing things. Then I’ll write in response to that, so I get that feeling all the time. Without that feeling, the song does not happen. That’s the genesis point of a Dry Cleaning song; if Tom plays something that inspires some kind of writing, whether it’s something that’s the opposite vibe to what he’s playing or something that amps up the emotional quality of what he’s playing.

A really easy one that springs to mind is the main riff of “Evil Evil Idiot” because he played it on a different tuning than he normally plays, so it was very, very striking for that reason. It was like a new type of sound in the room. It was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is really different!’ Then, also, the character of it was so distinct and very inspiring. You could write like 15 different lyrics for that song. It’s just got such a wealth of… It’s very fertile to me, that guitar line. I don’t know why, necessarily, it just makes me think of a million things. It’s very characterful; you can imagine a scene or a person, you can lean into the swagger of it, or you can easily write something that’s really strongly juxtaposed with it in a funny way. There’s so much to play off. But, yeah, I get that feeling all the time with Tom’s playing. That’s why I’m in the band, really. That’s a very enjoyable feeling.

NT: One of my favorite things about listening to a Dry Cleaning song for the first time is hearing what the lyrics will be. With Secret Love, I immediately fell in love with “Let Me Grow…”. It’s such a beautiful and sharply written song in how you express and capture the loneliness that anchors it. I'd love to hear about your experience writing these songs because, to me, I think they’re some of the best you’ve made as Dry Cleaning. Also, I’m curious after you mention there that you could write 15 or so different versions of a song when you heard the ‘Evil Evil Idiot” guitar line. How many different versions of the songs were there, and how many songs were?

Tom Dowse: Four songs didn't make the recording at all, and three that didn't make the album that we did record, but there were hundreds of demos. I think about 120 or something, maybe 117 and 20 jams? We spent about a week every day going to each other's flats and just listening to the demos to choose what we would work on next because there were so many!

NT: How many meetings did you have to whittle it down?!

Florence Shaw: Oh god, I think we even gave up at some point and just went, ‘Oh, we’ll listen to the rest somewhere down the line!’

Tom Dowse: I think a lot of the feelings that are on the album come from a sense of we had just spent two years touring the world, and it was really hard work, physically and emotionally, but we got through it. There was a sense of like, ‘Oh, we survived,’ and despite the pressures of all that, we’re closer than we were before. You’re leading on that, on how much closer you are, so you’re taking more leaps musically with each other. You’re sort of saying, ‘You know me by now, I’m going to do this,’ and everyone’s like, yeah, cool. You do know each other a lot, I think that’s a big thing in songwriting, especially as a group.

Florence Shaw: There are emotional qualities of the songs; it’s interesting because certainly there are rawer sentiments on the record that are less cloaked in different ideas or fewer emotions hidden in objects. I’ve always considered my writing to be personal, but it’s funny, people used to say it wasn’t, and that’s fine because I think it’s easy to read it as not, because there are a lot of objects, lots of references and not a lot of abstract nouns in my writing. At least definitely not the first two albums. This time, there are more lines explicitly about feelings, and there aren’t really two single lines on their own; there aren’t as many multiple layers, in a way. Well, there’s always multiple layers in the songs, as a whole, but in lines on their own, it’s less oblique, maybe. I might even be wrong about that, but I think that’s true!

The drive behind the writing for me has always been the same. I don’t feel different writing this kind of writing because it was the writing I was doing before. I don’t think to myself, ‘Oh my god, time to bear my soul!’ because it always felt like bearing my soul. I recognized in some lyricists, like Björk, for example. I really love Björk’s lyrics, and I really love Joanna Sternberg’s lyrics. There’s a directness about how they write about emotions, and particularly with Joanna Sternberg, feelings of self-hatred or the terrible feelings you can have about yourself. They put those straight into songs, but with the delivery, it’s very tender. It doesn’t sound self-important; it sounds quite heartbreaking and small, in a way.

I really admire that. I really got a lot out of listening to Joanna Sternberg’s music, and so, I thought, ‘Okay, that’s how you do that. That’s how you write about your innermost thoughts and feelings without sounding like a massive cunt!’ I really learned that lesson just from listening to Sternberg’s music. But, at the same time, that drive to reveal myself or whatever, that’s why you’re doing the writing, right? Because if you really were like, ‘Don’t look at me!’, then you wouldn’t do it at all. You’d just stay home on the sofa and not go and play loads of gigs. It’s an interesting one. I feel like I’m always circling around those thoughts.

NT: Across Secret Love, some of the melodic structures or textural qualities to the songs reminded me of XTC, Suicide, Television, and you’ve talked about Pentangle being an influence. They’re all incredible bands, but I was wondering what albums from last year you loved or if there are any albums you’re looking forward to coming out this year?

Tom Dowse: That’s funny you say that because when we just started out on the bus on Wednesday, I found on Instagram a band from Sydney called Station Model Violence. They’ve just put a track out and they’ve got an album coming out. Basically, I think it’s at least one, if not more, of the members from an Australian band called Total Control and Total Control were a massive influence on Dry Cleaning when we started. They were doing the post-punk thing but in a much more interesting way, like bringing in some synth-pop and stuff like that. They seem to have repeated the trip again it’s got a really weird Robert Fripp and Brian Eno vibe to it. I pretty much listened to it the entire week, one track on repeat! I get really obsessed by a song and I’ll listen to it on loop. I’ll probably be sick and tired of it when the album comes out, but I haven’t thought about that! That’s what I’m looking forward to this year.

Florence Shaw: I’m going to say the Bad Bunny record, [Debí Tirar Más Fotos], I fucking love that record. It was so good, and the artwork is amazing. Every aspect of that whole record just blew my mind. Even the little visualizer of the little frog in his bedroom. All the animation that he used, and yeah, the album cover is just amazing. The actual record itself is stunningly good. I just love Bad Bunny, and I keep forgetting that it came out last year because it came out in January, so I don’t think of it as a record from last year. I love that record, I listened to it a lot.

NT: Finally, now that there are three Dry Cleaning albums, you can prescribe them with the sibling birth order traits or qualities, you have the eldest, middle and youngest child. How would you describe each of the albums and how they relate to one another within the Dry Cleaning unit?

Florence Shaw: I have a really intense soft spot for Stumpwork. For whatever reason, Stumpwork means a lot to me, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Obviously, I was a part of making it, so that’s why it means a lot to me, but there’s something about that record in particular. There are a few songs on it that are just…“No Decent Shoes For Rain” is a song I never get sick of playing live. There’s something inside it that I feel endlessly captivated by the song. Maybe that’s something to do with it? I feel like Stumpwork is like my best friend or something. If someone says something mean about it, you’re like, ‘Fuck off!’ and you want to fight them, it brings immediate rage! Whereas, New Long Leg, I feel like I don’t remember anything about making it! It was such a smash and grab and a blur. It feels like I was really drunk or something for the whole time, which I wasn’t, but it feels like I was, because I just can’t remember it or that time.

Tom Dowse: Thinking of them as your kid is a really good analogy because once you finish recording them, they really have their own personality, and you can only see bits of yourself in it. It doesn’t even feel like you made it. It’s almost like it goes off and lives its own life. You’ll always have this affection for them, but you also have this thing where some people, I think parents don’t say this often, but I know friends of mine who are parents that would be like, ‘I don’t really like my kids!’, you know? It’s a real taboo thing to say, but I think New Long Leg is an awkward one. I think it was so exciting to make a record; at the same time, I wanted it to be like Secret Love, and I thought that’s how you make a record. The way we worked with Cate is how I thought you made records, in terms of layering, and the thing I like about working with Cate is that she wanted to explore lots of sonic fruit to find in every song. So, when you go into another section, a different sound comes along, and I think I was trying to do that, or I thought that’s what would happen on New Long Leg. John’s [Parish] way of producing was to keep it very stripped down, which, if you think about it, is probably the best thing to do with your first album.

Florence Shaw: I think he was well aware of that. That was the context because I would like to see what we would have made if we had the approach of Secret Love on our first record. I’m not sure how that would have gone because we were so, even though we weren’t really, really young when we made the first record, we were green, I would say. As everyone is on that record.

Tom Dowse: My feeling about New Long Leg is that I love it, but I don’t like it. I like the songs because we play them live, and they’re different things now, but I think Secret Love is probably the one. You know, it’s your third kid, and you’ve made all your mistakes with the other two kids, and they don’t like you. You’ve just had another kid and you’re much more comfortable about it because I would have felt, while doing New Long Leg, you have the thought in your head that you don’t really deserve to be there or something. You try to prove that you deserve to be here, and on the Secret Love, I didn’t have that anymore. I didn’t even think about it. I was just playing and just enjoying trying to explore new stuff. I wouldn’t have been able to do that with New Long Leg because I was still too, yeah, green, I guess. Secret Love is the newborn that everyone’s cooing over it and we’re very proud! People are like, ‘It looks just like you!’

Order Secret Love by Dry Cleaning HERE