Secret Love flourishes within the more experimental margins of rock.
Secret Love is Dry Cleaning’s third release, arriving three years after their second album ‘Stumpwork’, which itself followed just a year after their debut ‘New Long Leg’. In homage to the band's predilection for the seemingly benign and mundane facets of every-day life, I feel it’s appropriate to situate my listening experience within the confines of my trip to the laundromat.
It starts with the methodical sorting of dirty clothes into designated piles. The conveyor-belt rhythm underpinning ‘Hit My Head All Day’ pushes my body to pick up an item, inspect it, and then put it in the correct pile. Reeling from the quarter life crisis triggered by my most recent birthday, I’m sitting atop a wooden stool, watching the machines spin and wallowing in the self-consciousness I thought I’d have outgrown by now. So I find myself resonating with Shaw's musings “I’m old young. I ache and worry a lot about what people think of me”.
I am intimately acquainted with the frustrations of domestic maintenance described in ‘My Soul / Half Pint’, the futility of washing clothes that will get dirty over and over again. The softness of my sheets, warmed from the dryer, feels like ‘I Need You’ and I’m enamoured with the idea that someone might be waiting inside a talcum powder box for you to lift the lid and discover me and lift me gently into your palm”.
Florence Shaw’s distinctive vocal delivery is interwoven with the band’s carefully layered instrumentation, moving seamlessly between wiry post-punk tension, steady, hypnotic rhythms, and moments of ornate delicacy. Segments of wry humour, jaded frustration and incredible tenderness are meticulously sown throughout the album, coalescing into a tapestry that reads like the stray thoughts scribbled in a diary and sounds like doing my laundry. Secret Love flourishes within the more experimental margins of rock.
Words by Hannah Rose