Secret Love

Dry Cleaning have lost none of their distinctive edge, their idiosyncratic set-up proving to be endlessly elastic, as big as they want, as small as they need, to capture the chaos of the world. No hidden messages here: Secret Love is a wonderful record.

Dry Cleaning are still an acquired taste. But for those already tuned in, this is their most confident and complete record yet.

Another essential album in Dry Cleaning’s discography, and the first great album of this young year.

Dry Cleaning sound more expansive and present than ever on Secret Love, transcending their role as sprechgesang post-punk standard-bearers to become innovators whose surreal, poetic expressions of emotion reveal hearts as open as their eyes.

This more mainstream-friendly, luscious-yet-intimate sound is a huge gamble for Dry Cleaning, and they came through this stress test shining, delivering their best work so far.

Secret Love, produced by Cate Le Bon, obliterates the thought [they would struggle to surprise a second time] entirely. [Jan 2026, p.29]

With Secret Love, the South Londoners’ compelling combination reaches a zenith. In the four years since their last outing, the quartet doesn’t succumb to diminishing returns but instead delivers more of what made them such a draw in the first place.

Shaw’s untreated voice speaks directly into your ear, and Tom Dowse’s layered guitars are bright and upfront, doing so much melodic and textural work that they seem to wrap around and fill the space in every song.

Adept as Shaw is as a songwriter, these twists in tone would be harder to pull off were it not for the rest of the band, whose instrumental offerings have taken a noticeable leap forward since 2022’s Stumpwork album.

There’s plenty to dissect throughout Secret Love, whether it’s through stumbling onto its non-sequitur zingers or consciously untangling its deeper concepts. There’s no wrong way to approach it; it really works both ways.

It’s not a record likely to shift anyone’s needle on Dry Cleaning, but for those on the fonder side, it’s a whole new set of treats to explore.

‘Secret Love’ is an accomplished, assured effort – like its predecessors, yes, but in a manner that subverts the expectations set up by them.

Overall, the band sounds self-assured as they broaden their horizons without alienating their core fans. Secret Love is a gorgeously produced record that sounds vibrant, wandering, engaged, and slightly funky as Dry Cleaning continues to broaden their post-punk scope.

Secret Love follows 2022’s Stumpwork, an album that pushed Dry Cleaning’s sound towards more expansive routes, a direction of travel that, with the help of Cate Le Bon’s expert production, has led to their best work yet. It is also their most direct. [Christmas 2025, p.130]

It all works, to powerful effect. The sense of a band who have outgrown their original remit, outstripped their initial WTF? novelty value, and are shifting confidently into new spaces, is difficult to miss.

On Secret Love, their first album in three and a half years, Dry Cleaning are operating in a more intuitive, integrated way, investing the songs with pronounced dramatic cues, properly sung choruses, and playful call-and-response.

The core of the band’s chemistry remains intact, but during many of Secret Love’s best moments, the crew introduces new timbres and sonic ideas to further heighten the absurdity of the spoken-word lyrics.

Secret Love may well capture the vapidity of the consumeristic life, but does it, in the process, dip into vapidity itself? Rather than critiquing or lampooning end-stage capitalism, Shaw in particular seems to have succumbed to its toxicities. Perhaps the album is best heard as a memento mori, a dying declaration – art, like everything else, drowning in the waters of mendacity.

More often than not, they sound greater than the sum of their parts, which is a small step in the right direction.

Ultimately, Secret Love is a solid, yet unspectacular, entry in the Dry Cleaning canon.