For the most part, Dry Cleaning likes to make music without talking about it too much beforehand. But the London quartet—vocalist Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton—did discuss one idea when it came to the writing sessions for their third album. This, they decided, should be a record that evokes the sensory overload and hustle and bustle of what it feels like to walk through a city. As it happens, this was exactly the description that producer Cate Le Bon, also a solo artist and art-pop dynamo in her own right, used as she listened through the band’s demos. Seeking to add a panoramic expanse to the post-punk and angular experimental-rock grooves of their first two albums—2021’s New Long Leg and 2022 follow-up Stumpwork—Dry Cleaning realized they had found the perfect artistic foil. “Cate seemed to understand what we wanted from the record before we could verbalize it or before we even knew what we wanted,” Maynard tells Apple Music. “She seemed to understand where we were at.” The collaboration has resulted in Secret Love, the band’s most perfectly realized work to date, one that hones everything that’s gone before and emerges more dynamic, immediate, and accessible without the band losing any of their offbeat edge. “We wanted to push the album a bit more sonically,” adds Dowse. “We’re being a bit more expansive and working with some different textures.” Let the four-piece guide you through Secret Love, track by track. “Hit My Head All Day” Florence Shaw: “This was one of the first things that we jammed when we were meeting up in May last year. It wasn’t super serious, we were just warming up.” Lewis Maynard: “One of my favorite things about being in Dry Cleaning is you’re always listening and being aware to what’s happening around you, and you add to it. Nick had a drum machine and then started playing acoustic drums and then Flo started playing harmonica because I found one in my bedroom, even though I don’t think I’ve ever owned one. I just started playing bass and it went from there. I think that sums up Dry Cleaning quite nicely, where ideas come from, which is from anywhere and any moment.” FS: “A lot of the lyrics came quite late in the day. I was having nerve problems in my arms, and I went to a physio session. It was this nice feeling to relinquish control to someone trustworthy. She was bending my arms around behind my head and stuff to try to get my nerves to wake up, so some of the song was influenced by that, the idea of being manipulated and it sometimes being bad and sometimes being good.” “Cruise Ship Designer” FS: “We played it once, a one-off jam that was about 10 minutes long.We listened back to stuff we’d recorded on our phones and I had listened to it a couple of times, and I really liked it so I made a really rough edit of this 10-minute thing down to three minutes on GarageBand and recorded a vocal on it. No one was hugely excited about it. But then Cate was really interested in it. She was the first person to listen through and point it out as something that could make a really great song. She had this vision for backing vocals and everything. I think it’s important that if someone comes along and they’re emphatic about something, it’s kind of dumb to ignore it.” Nick Buxton: “We realized she was right.” “My Soul / Half Pint” Tom Dowse: “I think of Dr. Feelgood when I think of this, or something like The Stranglers or Talking Heads, where you’re just riffing on a feeling, a groove. It’s almost like a conversation between the guitar and the bass parts. It’s got such a nice atmosphere. It’s funny but it’s got a bit of a swagger to it as well. This and ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ are both me trying to be Keith Richards, but without the heroin, or all the skill.” “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)” NB: “I think we had some initial semblance of this song back in May or June 2024. I thought it was a really beautiful song because it’s quite uplifting but it’s quite fragile. Flo’s put this lovely vocal on the chorus where you’re really challenging yourself to sing in a way you haven’t sung before. That felt very exciting.” FS: “It’s about a concealment, the way that emotions find their way to the surface even if you’re trying to hide them. The inspiration was the idea of an artist who has secret feelings of love that they can’t show openly but they come out in their drawings. We talked about a lot of different album titles, and in a way, the title gives a new dimension to every song because it can speak to the idea of secret romantic feelings, but also it can almost be like a secret fetish or a secret obsession.” “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” FS: “I showed Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods the demo of this song a few months before we went in to record it properly, and he suggested that there be a sung part at the point where the saxophone comes in—he described it as putting a bow on it. It was a good idea.” TD: “There’s a ’70s live version of Pentangle doing a song called ‘Wedding Dress’ and unlike the recorded version, it starts on the drums, and the drums are really dance-y. It sounds almost like house music. I think we were approaching it from that way. We’ve never really seen ourselves as solely a post-punk band. That was really just a means to start writing music together, but our influences are much broader.” “Blood” TD: “I actually had the guitar parts and made another song in another band, probably like 15 years ago. We started jamming with this around about the time we’d finished [2021’s] New Long Leg. We really liked it but it just didn’t go anywhere, it would hit a brick wall. We even showed it to [producer] John Parish when we were demoing Stumpwork. He was like, ‘This is like a jangle salad.’ He really did not like it at all. We took it to Sonic Studios in Dublin to work on it with the guys from Gilla Band, Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox, and they took a scalpel to it and started to think about it from a different way around.” NB: “There was a real emphasis on contrast, loud and quiet, and sounds appearing and disappearing and textures. It just seemed like it was an open goal after that, so many things that everyone was trying just seemed to work instantly.” “Evil Evil Idiot” TD: “This didn’t really come to life until we went to work on it in Dublin with Gilla Band again. They gave it that kind of atmosphere. We wanted that heaviness of desert rock, but without it sounding like us trying to do desert rock.” FS: “The lyrics came in immediate response to the music. It was this idea of someone who loves burnt food. My dad used to love the taste of burnt sausages. Also, I’d just seen this video of an Italian grandma turning a pepper over on an open hob, putting her hands in the fire. I was like, ‘That’s cool, that has the energy of this type of music.’ It’s like this idea of this fucking sick individual who loves carbonated, weird charcoal in their mouth. And then there’s the extra lyrics about black plastic. We were staying in this grim flat in Dublin that had a lot of plastic utensils in the kitchen, as I have in my own home actually—I’ve thrown them all away though because I read this scary thing about black plastic seeping into food and it being really toxic, which I think has maybe been disproved now.” “Rocks” TD: “Again, this came from attempt to do a Rolling Stones-type thing. The riffs are all Keith Richards-inspired. We did do a demo of it to quite a high level but it was quite straightforward, everything was pulling in one direction and that’s not really a Dry Cleaning way of working. There was a band from Los Angeles in the late ’70s, early ’80s called Chrome, a punk band who have this burned-out sci-fi edge to them and when we started to frame it that way, it seemed like it was starting to spark off more energy in our brains.” “The Cute Things” TD: “This was one where we accidentally inhabited the spirit of Sheryl Crow.” LM: “We had to dial it back a little bit.” TD: “I think half of us were keen to dial it up…” NB: “It’s kind of a silly song. I was definitely unsure about whether it was going to be on the album or not. I couldn’t tell if it was frivolous or not. But when I would listen to the demo, it’d give me a bit of a chill like, ‘Oh, this is really exciting, all the stuff that’s happening.’ It feels quite an extreme element of the album, it’s quite far off in a corner on its own.” LM: “It’s a different vibe for the record, and we wanted to cover a lot of ground. We’ve done that on previous records, leaning in different directions, but this one is just a totally different tone for the record.” “I Need You” TD: “This is maybe our collective favorite song. I think we’ve had that in our locker for a while and things like ‘Leafy’ and ‘Strong Feelings’ [from New Long Leg] skirt around trying to make these quite tender, ambient sounds into pop songs, quite strange avant-garde pop songs. I think this is probably the best version of that we’ve ever done.” NB: “There’s loads of really nice textures in it. I think you have to make space for that. You can’t just cram everything in and hope that it’s going to come across. You have to sculpt a world where there’s space for the textures to arrive at your ears. For a band like us that can be very boisterous and loud, sometimes it’s really good to take a step back and do something more minimal.” “Joy” NB: “This was the last song we wrote for the album. It’s quite a complicated song because the music is quite uplifting and some of the lyrics are quite uplifting, but I think there is a darkness to it. It’s an interesting song to end the album on because it does present itself as being a positive end note, but there is some wariness to it.” LM: “It’s the closest we come to planning for a song. We realized we had a couple of weeks or so spare of writing, and we wanted to do something more upbeat.” TD: “The music for it came together really quickly. Just thinking about something with a bit more energy to it, something that was a bit more on the front foot, almost pop-punk but without being pop-punk. It reminds me of a bit of Guided By Voices or The Kinks. When we were recording it, we tried to keep the chime of The Kinks, the way that the tone of their guitars is so bright and so refreshing.”