“Hit My Head All Day,” the first single and lead track from Secret Love, the latest album from Dry Cleaning, has been in DJ queue for months now. It’s a song that I keep meaning to drop into a set, but for some reason haven’t yet. It’s such a weird little jam, a slice of ‘80s-style post-disco for the 2020s doomscroller with echoes of Flying Lizards and Dominatrix and the title repeated throughout the song. It’s slow— languid, really— which is probably why I haven’t played it out yet, but the groove is tight. It actually feels like you’re dragging yourself through another day of bad news to the beat of a world that’s on the verge of collapse, which is a very fucked up way to describe a song that you like, but its also art. It’s not supposed to be all hands-in-the-air escapism all the time. And there’s a catharsis that comes with that.
Really, that’s what I appreciate about Secret Love, the third album from English band Dry Cleaning. Everything about them feels extremely human and completely antithetical to the artifice and conformity of the algorithmic world. Dry Cleaning is a weird band in the best possible way and Secret Love is their weirdest album yet.
On Secret Love, Dry Cleaning doesn’t stick with any single sound. It’s an album that’s a little punk (“Rocks”), a little funk (“Hit My Head All Day”), a little pop (“Joy”) and even a little folk (“Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”). What ties everything together is vocalist Florence Shaw, whose soft spoken word delivery of lyrics that function more like poetry than songs is Dry Cleaning’s Love It-or-Hate It component. I’m firmly in the Love It camp, which is probably to be expected given the references to Flying Lizards and Dominatrix in the first paragraph of this review.
On the occasion that Shaw does sing, it’s less like a performance and more like a form of release. Try to imagine yourself in the car back in the days of CDs and tapes. Traffic is so bad that the album you popped into the stereo at the beginning of the drive has lapsed twice. You start singing along not because you’re imagining yourself as a rock star, but because it’s the only way you can keep yourself from screaming at every driver surrounding you. That’s how Shaw shifts from spoken word to song throughout the album.
Shaw’s lyrics are interesting in that they’re both hyper-specific and very open to interpretation. Some songs, like “Cruise Ship Designer,” “My Soul/Half Pint” and “Evil Evil Idiot,” are character sketches that expose the contradictions of being human. “Cruise Ship Designer” closes with a line that might sum up Shaw’s lyrical approach to the album, “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work.”
While not directly stated, “Blood” reads like a song about the genocide of Palestinians. Shaw near-whispers, “Schools and hospitals and homes/People are worse than you think/There are people who really don’t care.” It’s the darkest, and most poignant, song on the album. Shaw’s voice is matter-of-fact when she says, “Blood,” then she turns to song to add, “on my hands as well.”
“Blood on my screen,” she says, layered over her singing in the background, “in my dreams too.” It’s singing to keep from screaming.
Even the most audibly upbeat song on Secret Love, album closer “Joy,” has a kind of underlying darkness to it. There’s a sense of irony in Shaw’s delivery in the line “we’ll build a cute harmless world,” which is followed by “don’t want from you, cult.” There’s a push and pull between what people want and the entities selling it in the song that, despite its title and lighter melody, bears a lot of the same frustration that’s in “Hit My Head All Day.”
In the past few weeks leading up to today’s album release, Dry Cleaning has been getting a good amount of hype and that’s warranted. Secret Love is an excellent album. It captures the darkness of right now in a way that is unconventional and loaded with so much information, both musically and lyrically, that it requires multiple listens. What I’ve managed to glean from just the first couple listens is pretty superficial. Ask me about Secret Love in December and I’ll probably have something different to say about it.
Get Secret Love by Dry Cleaning
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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