Dry Cleaning Secret Love Indie Exclusive LP (Apricot Vinyl)

Brick & Mortar/Indie Retail Exclusive! Can only ship to USA address!

TAS Rated 4.5/5 Music, 5/5 Sonics in the May/June 2026 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Produced by Cate Le Bon, Secret Love started life in Peckham rehearsal spaces, all members – frontperson Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard – writing, playing and responding to each other in the room: in Dry Cleaning, music and lyrics form an inseparable, generative whole. The follow-up to Stumpwork evolved through affirming sessions at Jeff Tweedy's Chicago studio the Loft and explosive ones with Gilla Band's Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox at Sonic Studios in Dublin, taking advantage of the sonic particulars of each space, and finally with Cate Le Bon at Black Box in the Loire Valley.

Secret Love is the finest expression yet of the profound friendships that created Dry Cleaning. Here, the south London four-piece 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.

On their excellent third album Secret Love, British band Dry Cleaning once again take a knife to the current moment, carving out bite-sized observations with humor, absurdity, profundity, and chaos in equal measure. Their signature post-punk sound continues to develop, with vocalist Florence Shaw singing more than before and featuring tracks imbued with funk, noise rock, folk, and atmospheric sounds that are all rather new terrain for Dry Cleaning, yet feel completely at home.