Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love: Enchanting, Chiming, Exotic and Loud at Any Volume
Inside the band’s fantastic third album, out now on 4AD
Listen without points of reference, listen with joy, listen with the memory (or tonight’s reality) of dark windows of old pubs and the brutal mirrors of new skyscrapers.
Listen without grasping for your history (real) or your history (idealized), listen with the wide ears of an 11th grader discovering the left end of the dial, listen with the hopes for a new obsession by an 11th grader who wouldn’t even understand what “left of the dial” meant, new history, new history, nostalgia need not apply (but can be applied, happily through sad and wizened ear-hearts), this is twisted, cranky luxury music, yessir, listen, listen?
Listen ‘ere — when I was in my early 20s, I formed a strange little art rock band for this primary reason: I was looking through my record collection and I couldn’t find the exact thing I wanted to hear, so I figured I had to make it myself. To my ears, it sounds like Dry Cleaning created a band for the same reason.
Secret Love, the new (and third full-length) album from South London’s Dry Cleaning, is a series of amazing, glittering prizes masquerading as exotic, delicate objects. Secret Love is a magic box full of tiny gestures, a shout out to the days when an album was wrapped with the ribbons of unity but contained a full deck of near-perfect tracks; it’s been ages since I heard so many stand-alone Moments of Grace and/or Surprise and/or Effortless Wit banded together with such monumental humility, hah. Artistic but not arty, Secret Love is laded/loaded with pressured yet gorgeous space, whispers in a room full of nods, too much coffee tempered by just the right amount of waterfalls, the sound of the young person’s perfect city tempered with the low clouds of experience, hah, high street, low cobblestone, church chimes above and crushed glass beneath, sweetness and strangeness, strangeness and charm, strangeness and charm, thump and chime, thump and chime, so much air and a history of claustrophobia, the hopes of the agoraphobic, the spinning heart of stone circles and the midnight rush of high street and low ceilinged rooms full of charm and noise all over the world,
[a dream of Feelies via 4AD, what else do you need to know?]
[Frank O’Hara or maybe ever Ferlinghetti or heck John S. Hall bathed in the pool of Faith-era Cure via ASMR via my god, Chronic Town (my god = Chronic Town)] [Chronic Town is my god, but this is a different story, or is it?]
On Secret Love, Dry Cleaning gift us 11 tracks of strange/normal delight after delight after delight after delight, a musical description of the exact moment, maybe only eight or 88 seconds long, when the coffee and the whiskey meet in happy détente and the electric guitars are nearby begging you to turn your feelings into arpeggios; and aside from Immersion (a band I think Dry Cleaning has a lot in common with, for reasons I may or may not get around to detailing; but suffice to say they made 2025’s best album — Nanocluster, Vol. 3 — and it’s a lovely companion to Secret Love), I’m not sure anyone else has so gorgeously and effectively interpreted the space between motorik mesmer and R.E.M. chimegodliness and Adventure-era Television gentle-toughness/buttermilk crank and Wire-space…AH, but I said, uh, some old band names, something I had told myself I wasn’t going to do, so this must be said:
When you review an album like Secret Love, it is very goddamn easy to slip into doing the journalistic equivalent of one of those suspect boards you see on a TV detective/police procedural; you know, all these photos and words scrawled in magic marker, with lines drawn (and sometimes string) linking them. Y’see, the issue with virtually all contemporary/post-millennial Post Punk acts is, to paraphrase Peter Griffin’s stellar quote about The Godfather, that they insist on themselves; they want to make sure you absolutely and utterly know all the cool shit they have listened to, or at least the stuff their 1980s college radio DJ parents foisted on them. “Ah! They’re only 22 but they’ve heard the Au Pairs!! Isn’t that soooo cute?!?” “Wow, those teenagers also love Remain in Light! Isn’t that daaaarling?!?” “Why, when I was 19, I listened to the Cocteau Twins, and it’s clear they listened to them when they were 19, too!” I am soooo proud I wasted my life boring people with long explanations of what Rough Trade Records was, and why the guy sitting next to me on the plane HAD to listen to early Scritti Politti! It was ALL worth it, because, wow, there are actually kids out there who dig the Raincoats!!”
But I don’t want to do that.
I’d rather see Dry Cleaning and Secret Love on their own terms: An angry and opulent and delightful pocket-sized band who make music languid and lovable but tense and quietly loud guitar ensemble music, and of whom I state, adamantly: This is a band that does not traffic in the past; it traffics in joy, that is, the joy of listening to each other; Dry Cleaning traffic in magical ensemble playing loaded with actual listening, restraint, and reaction, quiet fireworks and patience and knowing when to not do more. As for the other elephant in the room, the “spoken word” vocals (well, about two-thirds of the vocals can be filed under that label), I just cannot think of Dry Cleaning as a spoken word band, not remotely, because the sing/speak feels like the absolutely right and unpretentious artistic and emotive choice, not an imposition; and the vocals frequently, effortlessly slides into an effective and moving croon, the transition so natural you can’t call the non-sung vocals ‘spoken’ and you can’t call the ‘sung’ vocals ‘not spoken.’
Every track on Secret Love has a fierce, delightful, engaging value, and each time you listen to it (as a whole, or, I suppose, even in part) Secret Love gets better, deeper, more full of strange joys, like a new/old city unfolding and opening as night grows and more hissing neon and shadowy alleys reveal themselves. Each and every track could be its’ own extraordinary single, and each and every track would be one of your favorite singles of the year. In fact, the steady, near-motorik pulse of the album and the happy, refreshing lack of interest in engaging in LOUD and MORE LOUD over-mastering not only creates the effect of a near-unique ambient (true) rock, it also tends to create a happy wash that may make you not notice how wonderful each track is on its own merits.
Dry Cleaning create their own dynamics IN THE ROOM and via the emotional qualities of the playing, the arrangements, and the lyrics, and they let these speak for their goddamn selves. I have to stress that: so very, very many producers/mixers would have turned guitars or drums up, UP (or even worse, engaged in the ever-prevalent mastering abuse!) instead of creating this unified, consistent ensemble sound and letting it speak/sing for itself; and this is so very unique in this day and age of mastering/arrangement spikes and valleys; other similar bands fall for these mixer tricks, but Dry Cleaning refuse, they apply an aural patience to everything they do, which just brings out the brilliance more.
VIDEO: Dry Cleaning “Secret Love (Concealed in the Drawing of a Boy)”
From beginning to end, Secret Love is aural and literal poetry, and condensed confessions, sort of like all your favorite albums (and/or favorite era of your favorite bands) crunched into a little ball and shat out like Nibbler on Futurama; in fact, like Nibbler on Futurama, Secret Love is cute but feral, cuddly but full of the sparks of personal/social history/neurosis/hang-ups and a dictionary of musical obsessions, expressed both effortlessly and gorgeously.
Listen, this a delicious album to listen to: Luxurious yet tense, brushed with the magic of the steady, understated rhythms, rich and sometimes steely arpeggios, a soupcon of roar and crank, and the conversational, exotic vocals. Everything, even the friction, is understated, which reminds me that Dry Cleaning regularly achieve one of the most difficult qualities a band can aspire to: they are loud at any volume.
The more you listen, the wider and deeper it gets, the more it stands on its’ own feet, and that’s where Secret Love should stand.
Get the eff out of the way, purveyors of prideful and self-conscious references, Dry Cleaning create utterly enchanting electric ensemble rock for the very best reason: They couldn’t find what they wanted to hear in their record collections, so they plugged in the yarn of heart an’ angst and knitted something themselves; and in doing so, nostalgia was damned, and the present was fiercely underlined.
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