There’s a special kind of magic that happens when a band steps out from behind its own cleverness and meets the listener’s gaze head-on. If Dry Cleaning’s previous releases felt like eavesdropping on a private conversation at a party, Secret Love, the band’s third album, is the moment their musicality claims the spotlight and refuses to let go.
Guided by the avant-pop instincts of producer Cate Le Bon, the London quartet undergoes a full metamorphosis here, delivering a widescreen realisation of their once-fragmented world. What could previously be summed up as spiky, post-punk detachment has become something more vital and richly textural, yet still profoundly human; a high-definition upgrade that makes them not just the most interesting band in the room, but the most essential.
This evolution is clearest in the symbiotic pull between Florence Shaw’s singular lyricism and the group’s widening sonic horizons. Shaw, a visual artist by trade, still works with found language, scraps of the mundane and the surreal, but the patterns she weaves feel more intentional. On the standout “Cruise Ship Designer,” she admits to planting “hidden messages” in her work; for the first time, those messages beat with raw, unmistakable vulnerability.
The album opens with “Hit My Head All Day,” a small revelation. Channelling the swampy, psychedelic funk of Sly And The Family Stone, it rides a subterranean groove that stretches over six minutes without losing its grip. It sounds like a band finally taking up the space it deserves, letting the music breathe as Shaw dissects the digital toxicity of the modern age. That same assurance carries into “Cruise Ship Designer,” the group’s most subversive take on a pop anthem so far, built on a bright, angular riff and a vocal delivery that edges closer to melody than ever before.
Secret Love does not shy away from the shadows. Shaw calls the collection “sad and dark,” a mood distilled in the serrated, anti-capitalist critique of “Blood.” The track plays like a fever dream, shifting from shimmering dissonance to a relentless, clipping beat that mirrors 21st-century anxiety. Elsewhere, the heavy, urgent thrash of “Rocks” proves the quartet has not lost its post-punk bite, while the jagged “Evil Evil Idiot” offers a strange, imaginative snapshot of what it means to survive now.
What earns Secret Love a perfect score is its emotional arc. After moving through complicity, social pressure and fractured identity, the band closes on “Joy”, a rare, clear-eyed burst of optimism that feels hard-won rather than naive. When Shaw asks the listener not to “give up on being sweet,” the record reaches a kind of grace. Secret Love is not only Dry Cleaning’s finest work to date; it feels like a definitive statement on how to find connection in a world built to keep us apart.
