It’s onerous to sing alongside to a Dry Cleansing track—and the explanations transcend the actual fact their lead singer, Florence Shaw, isn’t actually one for singing. Few songwriters grant you such open entry to the interior workings of their thoughts as Shaw, whose free-ranging soliloquies can ping-pong between quotidian mundanity, social critique, and dadaist farce in a single verse, all whereas she maintains the calm elocution of a wellness podcast host. When the music feels a bit like discovering somebody’s cache of personal “be aware to self” recordings, attempting to sing alongside would simply really feel invasive.
Whereas Shaw’s deadpan supply could appear to be an rigid instrument, it’s the anchor that enables her bandmates—guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton—to roam freely. Even because the gnarled guitar of their early EPs gave option to the jangly jaunts of 2022’s Stumpwork, the band might really feel safe within the data that any track that includes Shaw on vocals will sound like a Dry Cleansing track and nothing however. In a way, their relationship is like that of a director and film-score composer, forging a parallel-play dynamic between spoken narrative and soundtrack. However on Secret Love, their first album in three and a half years, Dry Cleansing are working in a extra intuitive, built-in approach, investing the songs with pronounced dramatic cues, correctly sung choruses, and playful call-and-response. The band’s musical imaginative and prescient continues to broaden, rendering even a catch-all time period like “post-punk” inadequate to embody their chameleonism.
With Secret Love, Dry Cleansing discover a excellent game-recognize-game confederate in Welsh indie auteur Cate Le Bon, who’s turn out to be not simply an in-demand producer, however virtually a subgenre unto herself, attracting like–minded practitioners of off-kilter, observational art-pop into her orbit. All through her private and manufacturing discography, Le Bon shows a present for transmuting frostiness into frisson, and he or she works the same magic on Secret Love. Perhaps life within the mid 2020s attracts you to the panic-attack paranoia of Geese singing, “There’s a bomb in my automobile”; Dry Cleansing are extra apt to direct worry inward. The album’s lead single, “Hit My Head All Day” (launched in the identical week final fall as Getting Killed) depicts the mind-numbing malaise of trudging by a world choking on rage-baiting disinformation as a slow-motion Scary Monsters-esque carousel of disjointed funk, Frippian fretboard strangulations, and goon-squad chants. And but, two-thirds into the track’s six-minute lurch, a beaming synth line seems like a biblical burst of sunshine, a plea for sanctuary from perpetual chaos.
When she’s not cataloging her self-harm-as-self-care rituals, Shaw makes use of her blasé-faire vocal tone as an avatar for the types of people that can extra simply ignore the world’s indignities. Over the chirpy riff of “Cruise Ship Designer,” Shaw’s smug protagonist tries to persuade us that constructing nautical playgrounds for the wealthy constitutes a noble inventive pursuit whereas he waits for the spoils of the 1 % trickle right down to him. (Perhaps she’s additionally speaking about musicians who signal away their artistic freedoms and livelihoods to business gatekeepers for an ever-shrinking piece of the pie.)
