Secret Love is the finest expression yet of the profound friendships that created Dry Cleaning. Here, front person Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard take their place in rock’s avant garde, catalysing the Reaganite paranoia of early 80s US punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave and pastoral fingerpicking, while Florence’s delivery, meticulously calibrated to her bandmates’ soundscapes, asserts her in a lineage of spoken-word artists stretching from Laurie Anderson to Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins. Producer Cate Le Bon likens the impression of listening to walking through a city; these 11 songs might also arrive like distinct images in a gallery.

The record started life in Peckham rehearsal spaces, the south London four-piece writing, playing and responding to each other in the room, the instrumentalists egging each other on as Florence drew from her collection of postcards and found materials: in Dry Cleaning, music and lyrics form an inseparable, generative whole. Then they bundled their demos in a suitcase and took them to musical friends with strong palettes to test and twist them. Secret Love evolved through affirming sessions at Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio the Loft and explosive ones with Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox in Dublin, taking advantage of the sonic particulars of each space, and finally with Cate in the Loire Valley. Some acts would fear being subsumed by these other musical iconoclasts. Dry Cleaning wanted to push themselves harder than they ever had before. “We’re very confident about our identity,” says Florence. “It doesn’t seem to be possible to break it down.”

Secret Love is a singular, career-defining statement, coming after debut New Long Leg (2021) and Stumpwork (2022) and will be released on 9th January 2026 via 4AD.

The Milk

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