Dry Cleaning were born to stand out from the jump with vocalist Florence Shaw’s spoken word and her bandmates’ knack for jolty, propulsive post-punk. Their first two albums, ‘New Long Leg’ and ‘Stumpwork’, came in rapidfire succession, released within a year of one another in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Their third album ‘Secret Love’ arrives with both breathing space and a recalibrated sense of purpose, as the band collectively push to prove there’s more to their repertoire.

Rather than reunite with go-to producer John Parish, for instance, they’ve instead opted for Cate Le Bon behind the boards. There are considerable steps in a folkier direction that have her influence immediately apparent – see the steely mandolin that weaves around the title track, or the dizzying finger-picked acoustic guitars that centre themselves in ‘Let Me Grow And You’ll See the Fruit’. You can even trust she was the one to coax Shaw’s silent bandmates into singing, which they do in a delightfully droll deadpan on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’.

There are equal and opposite reactions, too. Opener ‘Hit My Head All Day’ – one of the band’s longest tracks at just over six minutes – skirts across a pummelling drum loop that recalls Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’, while bassist Lewis Maynard channels his inner Tina Weymouth to slink between drummer Nick Buxton’s tasteful bongos and Shaw’s incredulous delivery of some of the album’s driest, funniest lyrics (“When I was a child / I wanted to be a horse”). ‘Rocks’, meanwhile, pairs some of Tom Dowse’s rawest, noisiest guitar parts with a pulsing industrial snare in a manner that even the ‘Boundary Road Snacks And Drinks’ era of the band might’ve deemed a bit too envelope-pushing.

Shaw, amid all of the sonic changes, remains Dry Cleaning’s sole constant. She’s still coming to terms with her timid singing voice, which actually provides some of the album’s catchiest moments, but it’s when she’s back in her beat-poet fugue state that she really thrives. “Pilgrimage / Private life / Mortality / Deep shock felt in the body,” she opaquely opines on the jangly ‘Blood’, one of the album’s standout tracks.

‘Secret Love’ is an accomplished, assured effort – like its predecessors, yes, but in a manner that subverts the expectations set up by them. By continuing to flip the script on what could have been one of the more one-note acts of the decade (on paper, at least), Dry Cleaning have simultaneously surprised and impressed in their artistic evolution. Even on the edge, the band are still finding new terrain to explore – and you imagine they’ll be at it for a while yet.

Details

• Record label: 4AD
• Release date: January 9, 2026