Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love is a work of everyday poetry

Art so often holds a mirror to its times, with varying degrees of directness or success. Few contemporary guitar bands have captured our baffling world – one glimpsed increasingly through a small rectangular window – better than south London four-piece Dry Cleaning, who explore the clanging juxtapositions of crisis, wit and everyday banality.

Dissonance is not a new kind of fuel. When the television executive Suzanne Collins set about writing The Hunger Games, she was inspired by the strangeness of watching the Iraq war on the news, before flicking over to a reality gameshow, then some elaborately costumed drama. The aim was to make a feature of – and to query – the flattening of the rollercoaster of emotions into mere spectacle.

A similar strategy is at work with Dry Cleaning, albeit one that is more lo-fi, art school and post-punk in approach. Releasing their first album, New Long Leg, during the pandemic, the group offered up disjointed impressions voiced by vocalist Florence Shaw in a gentle monotone, as a band meandered around her. Her intimate anti-singing flew in the face of “frontwoman” tropes: her output more in keeping with cut-up poetry or performance art, but always in dialogue with the musicians who eddied around her.

These were not agit-prop takedowns or punky rants, but oblique vignettes unfolding impressionistically, through lyrics that defied the listener to invest too much in them. And yet, somehow, fans understood exactly what Dry Cleaning were getting at. Their songs were sharp, but goofy and touching, echoing the listener’s own randomised internal monologues. Food thoughts. Billboard blare. Cat falling over. Something troubling overheard in a cafe.

That template continues largely unaltered on their third album, Secret Love, the band’s most assured yet. Once again, Shaw’s pronouncements remain set to Tom Dowse’s abrasive post-punk guitar and Lewis Maynard’s downright funky basslines, paired with the imaginative percussion of drummer Nick Buxton.

But refinements are evident. Hit My Head All Day, the first offering from the album, uses heavy breathing as percussion and sounds a little like Gang of Four hanging out with Tom Tom Club. Loosely, Shaw considers how much manipulation exists in our daily lives. Then she breaks off – “When I was a child, I wanted to be a horse” – an irruption of innocence in her song of experience.

It is tempting to lift a line from Cruise Ship Designer – a portrait of a deluded creative – to sum up Secret Love. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” Shaw sneers. But, really, the appeal of this silvery band seems to be closer to another line, from Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit: “I enjoyed your gig, even though I thought there were spiders all over me.”

The album’s closing track, Joy, pieces together words from adverts in Virginia Tech university’s history of food and drink archive. “Everyone I know, we’re talking about hot peppers,” intones Shaw, in between exhortations to “remain sweet” in the face of everything. “Try to make a map of the heart,” she adds – a literal instruction. “Down your hollow tube, I hope to find a small flap.”

There are a few more electronics on this record, but they are not showy; Dry Cleaning’s songs remain heroically uncluttered. Shaw occasionally sings a little; a tentative, vulnerable undertaking that works better on some songs (My Soul/Half Pint) than others (her thin, quavery chorus on the title track).

Dowse’s guitar finds pretty new gears, as well as increasing detours into Chic funk. There’s a long outro – to The Cute Things – that showcases his bold fluency; it might be his longest solo yet.

Time spent in Wilco’s Chicago studio allowed Dry Cleaning access to different instruments and a change of creative scenery, while sessions with Gilla Band in Dublin honed their dissonant instincts. The album was produced by Cate Le Bon, a kindred restless spirit. The result is a more danceable, more digressive and more explicit album than their previous records.

There are tracks you could just about call love songs (I Need You). Influencers peddling falsehoods get it in the neck on Evil Evil Idiot. Blood considers the horrors other people are suffering, and we are witnessing. “Blood (on my hands as well), blood on my screen, blood for breakfast (and in my dreams too), I don’t want to see any more,” Shaw hisses.

On the painted cover image she has one eye closed, the other held open by an anonymous hand. She is having them washed out.

Photograph by Max Miechowski