Dry Cleaning

Dry Cleaning are the kind of band that sounds like nothing else and still somehow sounds completely inevitable. The London four-piece built their reputation on a very specific formula: massive, locked-in guitar riffs anchoring Florence Shaw’s deadpan spoken-word vocal delivery, which slides through fragments of mundane observation, interior monologue, and low-grade existential anxiety like someone reading their grocery list in the middle of a fever dream. It should not work as well as it does. It works almost unfailingly.

Shaw came to fronting a band sideways. She is primarily a visual artist, and her approach to lyrics reflects that. She has described her writing process as something closer to collage than composition, pulling images and phrases that interest her without necessarily worrying too much about narrative coherence. The result is a body of work that rewards close listening and also functions perfectly well as texture, as atmosphere, as something you put on and let wash over you while your brain does something else entirely.

The band formed in London around 2017 and released their debut album New Long Leg in 2021 on 4AD. It arrived during a moment when post-punk had its critical credibility firmly back, and Dry Cleaning were immediately placed alongside acts like Squid and black midi as part of a new London scene making tightly wound, angular guitar music with something going on upstairs. New Long Leg was more than a scene document though. It was a fully formed statement, and the attention it received felt earned.

Stumpwork followed in 2022, and where New Long Leg felt like an arrival, Stumpwork felt like exploration. It was looser in places, more varied in texture, willing to go somewhere quieter or stranger or more openly emotional than the debut had been. Shaw’s lyrics got weirder. The band got better at giving her space.

Secret Love, released in 2024, continued that trajectory. The record found the band working with what they’d built while pushing at the edges of it. Shaw’s delivery remained her singular instrument, but the band around her had developed a more dynamic vocabulary. Not louder necessarily, just more intentional about dynamics, about when to pull back and when to hit.

This week the band released a new single, “Sliced by a Fingernail,” accompanied by a video that matches Shaw’s lyrical energy with some commitment: a dancer doing headspins on top of a washing machine in what appears to be a basement. The song came with an expansion of their current tour, extending into Australia, New Zealand, and further European dates through the summer. The band are not slowing down.

Shaw has said in interviews that the song was inspired by an illustrated picture book about a dog with a long body, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how Dry Cleaning operates. The specific absurdity of the source material becomes raw material for something that sounds like dread and humor existing in the same sentence. Which is, at this point, their whole thing. And it remains one of the more interesting whole things in guitar music right now.