Review: DRY CLEANING – “Secret Love”

Dry Cleaning return with “Secret Love”, their third studio album, and they do so with a record that does not seek consolation or consensus: a tense, nervous work, crossed by an urgency that has nothing generational and very clinical.

Tom Dowse's knotty guitar moves like a Keith Richards stripped of any mythological residue, lost in a post-industrial landscape where the groove is reduced to the bare bones and every chord seems like withheld information. Cate Le Bon's production acts like a chemical reagent: it separates, isolates, dissects. Nothing is bulked out or made “epic”. On the contrary, Secret Love thrives on subtraction and friction, allowing the identity of a band to emerge that has made friendship a form of aesthetic resistance, not a brand.

At the center remains Florence Shaw, a voice and presence that rejects any idea of ​​emotional interpretation. His spoken word, impassive and implacable, inherits the conceptual rigor of Laurie Anderson but deprives it of any futuristic abstraction: Shaw is a cold, almost notarial witness, who records the collapse of relationships, the subtle violence of digital language, the cognitive fragility of the hyper-connected individual.

The opening Hit My Head All Day it works as a declaration of intent: a song that investigates the manipulation, the vulnerability of bodies and minds in the ecosystem of algorithmic disinformation. There is no explicit complaint, only an accumulation of signals, as in a feed that cannot be interrupted.

Musically and thematically, Secret Love proceeds through abrupt changes in atmosphere: from the deconstructed New Romanticism of I Need You to the dry bravado of The Cute ThingsDry Cleaning confirm that they are one of the few post-punk bands capable of using the song form as a critical device, not as a nostalgic refuge.

Overall, this is no longer just a record, but a phonetic transcription of contemporary paranoia: the point at which the line between the friend and the digital “sinister stranger” dissolves. In this instrumental stream of consciousness, Dry Cleaning summon the ghosts of Reaganite punk to tell the story of the failure of trust. Secret Love does not seduce, it does not embrace, it does not reassure. It shines with a cold, cultured and abrasive light, and for this very reason it leaves its mark.

ps. 10 for the album cover created by the artist Erica Eyres, Canadian painter living in Scotland. The image depicts frontwoman Florence Shaw while someone holds her eye open, suggesting a visual and conceptual laying bare that dialogues with the mnestic and attentional themes of the record.

SCORE: 7.50

TO LISTEN NOW

Hit My Head All Day – Evil Evil Idiot – I Need You

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

The album works and amazes from start to finish!