Dry Cleaning

Dry Cleaning is a London-based band whose 2021 debut New Long Leg arrived as one of the more unexpected breakout records of the year. The combination of singer Florence Shaw’s deadpan spoken-word vocals and the band’s angular post-punk instrumentation created something that sounded genuinely new without being difficult in the way that music that sounds genuinely new often is.

Shaw does not sing in any conventional sense. She delivers lyrics over the music in a flat, precise voice that treats the words as text rather than melody, and the words themselves are collages of overheard speech, advertising language, and domestic observation that resist easy interpretation. The effect is disorienting and, once you have adjusted to it, extremely funny and strangely moving.

The instrumentation, driven by guitarist Tom Dowse, creates a specific kind of tension that the vocals both heighten and deflate. The songs are post-punk in structure without being nostalgic about post-punk. They move at a pace that feels deliberate rather than rushed, and the arrangements leave space in ways that make the moments of intensity land harder.

Stumpwork in 2022 extended the approach while expanding the sonic palette slightly. The band has continued to tour and has maintained the critical reputation established by the debut without making any obvious concessions to the expectations that reputation created.

Dry Cleaning is the kind of band that people discover and immediately want to tell someone else about, which is the most reliable indicator that something genuinely interesting is happening. Shaw’s voice is one of the more distinctive in contemporary music, and the fact that she arrived with it fully formed suggests that the restraint is a choice rather than a limitation.