Secret Love - Dry Cleaning
Released January 9th via 4AD
By Mark Velazquez
Going into Secret Love, I didn’t really know what to expect. I hadn’t spent time with Dry Cleaning’s earlier work, but I kept seeing artists I trust praising the album, and the fact that it was produced by Cate Le Bon made me curious. It felt like one of those records people weren’t just casually enjoying, but sitting with. So I pressed play without a frame of reference, which ended up shaping how the album unfolded for me.
The first thing that stood out was how intentionally uncomfortable parts of the record feel. Florence Shaw doesn’t really sing in the traditional sense. She speaks. Her voice moves through lines that often feel strange, funny, awkward, or quietly heavy, delivered with a calmness that makes the words land even harder. There are moments where her lyrics read like fragments of messages or notes to herself, observations that don’t announce their meaning but sit there waiting to be interpreted. It makes the album hard to sing along to, but also hard to tune out.
A line like “Your car, your driver (hi) / I think I will see you before you get this” captures that feeling. It sounds simple, almost casual, but there’s an intimacy to it that feels uninvited in a way that’s compelling. The words don’t feel written for performance as much as overheard. Throughout Secret Love, Shaw’s delivery turns everyday language into something slightly uncanny, like reading someone else’s unfinished thoughts.
That tension between mundane detail and emotional weight shows up clearly on “Evil Evil Idiot.” Shaw fixates on something as specific and strange as burnt food, repeating lines about scorching meals and flames cleansing plastic residue from “precious natural ingredients.” It’s funny, off-putting, and oddly revealing all at once. The song feels less like storytelling and more like documentation, a snapshot of someone’s internal logic presented without explanation. These are not lyrics meant to be universal. They’re meant to be exact.
Tracks like “Hit My Head All Day” establish that tone early. The song moves with a slow, uneasy patience, giving Shaw room to drift through her lines while guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton build and release tension around her. The band rarely competes with her voice. Instead, they seem to orbit it, creating motion and mood without demanding attention.
On “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit,” Shaw sounds especially exposed, wandering through observations that feel both detached and quietly emotional. There’s a push and pull between how plain the words can be and how personal they start to feel the longer you sit with them. Elsewhere, “Cruise Ship Designer” captures the album’s stranger instincts. It isn’t immediately inviting, but it’s perplexing in a way that makes it easy to return to, the kind of track that doesn’t resolve itself all at once.
Secret Love is not typically the kind of album I gravitate toward, and it didn’t fully click on first listen. It grew on me. The more time I spent with it, the more its strangeness began to feel intentional rather than alienating. Cate Le Bon’s production plays a big role in that growth, giving the album enough space and clarity that even its most uneasy moments feel considered rather than chaotic.
As a whole, Secret Love feels less like a statement and more like a collection of perspectives. It documents ways of noticing the world, small fixations, drifting thoughts, social unease, private humor. The album doesn’t guide you toward a single emotion. It lets the listener move between curiosity, discomfort, and quiet recognition.
As a first introduction to Dry Cleaning, Secret Love feels built around attention rather than impact. It rewards listening closely. Not because it reveals big moments, but because its details start to stack. The more time you spend with it, the more its strange language begins to feel familiar.
Tracklist —
Secret Love
Hit My Head All Day – 6:03
Cruise Ship Designer – 2:29
My Soul / Half Pint – 3:57
Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy) – 3:21
Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit – 3:09
Blood – 3:23
Evil Evil Idiot – 3:59
Rocks – 2:59
The Cute Things – 4:15
I Need You – 4:33
Joy – 2:53
Total runtime: ~41 minutes
