Review: Dry Cleaning — Secret Love

Dry Cleaning
Secret Love
4AD
Street: 01.09.2026
Dry Cleaning = The Velvet Underground + Kim Gordon 

The new Dry Cleaning record, Secret Love, is a stunner. Vocalist Florence Shaw talk/sings in a delicious, deadpan and direct style, allowing Thomas Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Nick Buxton (drums) to swirl heavily around Shaw’s stream of consciousness musings with a post punk pulse that whips up like a whirlwind, with New Order-inspired bass lines and Robert Fripp slicing guitar runs that cut like knives.

Shaw is Prospero of The Tempest. She is a combination of Lou Reed and E.E. Cummings filtered through a Kim Gordon, late-night, New York, Sonic Youth vibe with a little Dorothy Parker bite, delivered in a South London accent that makes unchecked malaise sound so dangerous and fun.

Shaw sings of scorched food, cruise ship designers, evil idiots, the soul, blood, cute things and joy. She delivers the apocalypse of simple everyday things with the same intensity of reading her grocery list out loud to herself while leaning on her shopping cart in the produce section of the supermarket. Shaw shoves those drifting in the collective unease right into hotline anxiety. Just like punk rock.

“Life, a series of memorials and signals / Telling us this or that,” Shaw explains on the opening track, “Hit My Head All Day.” “The objects outside the head control the mind / To arrange them is to control people’s thinking.” The song is a slow, steady banger with crushing drum beats and a cutting guitar that drifts in and out. Dry Cleaning turns this song of everyday paranoia into something you can dance to.

Shaw takes a swing at patriarchy on the track “My Soul / Half Pint” and lands the punch. “Everything has a home in my house / But I don’t like to clean / I find cleaning demeaning.” She adds: “I feel resentment in my soul / Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like, five hundred years.” Dry Cleaning finds themselves in top-form paranoia on “Let Me Grow and You’ll See The Fruit.” Shaw speaks: “Tears squeeze out / I can watch this TV show for however long, Armstrong / No one coming along with a video call, or a survey, or a dick pic or a loud bang / or a smell that comes up / You see I’m afraid of my privacy.”

Shaw’s musings intensify on the track “Evil Evil Idiot.” “I’m old young / I ache and worry a lot of what people think of me / Christmas TV on my mind.” Shaw then takes a drastic, unpredictable turn: “I don’t want to be lectured / I like to burn my food up / Flames baptize the filth of plastic surfaces that have migrated onto my precious natural ingredients / I could never live with someone who didn’t love scorched and burnt foods as much as me.” Shaw continues, “There have been malicious studies that discredited heavily carbonized foods as carcinogenic / But it didn’t put me off / One needs to enjoy life.” The track moves along with a simple bass and cutting guitar runs. The album ends with a song titled “Joy.” “It’s a horror land / Destruction / Don’t give up / On being sweet.” Perfect.

Dry Cleaning is defined as “The process of cleaning a garment with an organic solvent, without using water.” Dry cleaning machines play a crucial role in the textile care industry. It is NOT a name for an important rock-n-roll band. But it works. Shaw makes the minute horrors of everyday life simply ordinary. Moments untangling and tangling little by little into a lifetime. “There are hidden messages with my work,” Shaw sing-talks on the song “Cruise Ship Designer.” I want to spend as much time as possible looking for those hidden messages. Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love is a perfect January 2026 level set. This band needs to live in your head. —Russ Holsten

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