I can hardly stand Ducks, Newburyport. Heralded as one of the finest novels of 2019, Lucy Ellmann’s stream-of-consciousness prose follows an Ohioan housewife who spends her hours baking pies and cleaning the domicile, all while occasionally ruminating on American politics and the lives of her children. It takes an experimental approach, each of its roughly 1,000 pages composed of (mostly) a single run-on sentence. Nearly every phrase begins with “the fact that,” and it remains fixed in that mode until the novelty wears thin around 100 pages in. Despite its critical acclaim, Ellmann’s epic feels anything but.
But it’s precisely where that book fell frustratingly short for me—namely its rote repetitions and dull style—that Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love soars. Stream-of-consciousness writing, in the wrong hands, can quickly hit a brick wall. Florence Shaw, whose musings on the mundane sit at the forefront of her post-punk band’s sonic squall, litters her lyrics with enough wry humor, expressive delivery, and colorful diction to make matters continuously interesting. Accompanying her piquant writing are guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, drummer Nick Buxton, and, notably new to the ensemble for their third album, producer Cate Le Bon.
At the helm of the decade’s post-punk groups, Dry Cleaning have been churning out this blend of Shaw’s interior monologues and art-rock backdrops since their 2021 breakout debut New Long Leg, and they quickly followed it up with the slightly more muted Stumpwork just one year later. 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.
The star of the show, as on Dry Cleaning’s previous two records, is Shaw’s writing. Certain lines jump out of the mix, like reading a book with small sections highlighted by a previous owner. On “The Cute Things,” she details twin siblings at an impasse, capturing familial disconnect in one pithy sentence: “We’re meant to be from the same egg, but you confuse me.” “Let Me Grow And You’ll See the Fruit” follows a narrator who professes their unmatched ability to ward off solicitous distractions, only to indulge in a different distraction of their own choosing. “I can watch this TV show for however long, Armstrong,” Shaw deadpans. Her character delights at not being interrupted by a “video call or a survey or a dick pic or a loud bang or a smell that comes up.” In a similar vein, “Evil Evil Idiot” staunchly defends microwaved meals, defiantly dismissing those “malicious studies” that underline the heating device’s carcinogenic effects.
Shaw’s bandmates augment her ear-catching observations. Take Dowse’s performance on “My Soul / Half Pint,” in which elastic guitar lines dance around the stereo field like the duster and vacuum its narrator uses to begrudgingly clean their living area. The locked-in rhythm section provides steady scenery on “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy),” but its subtle switch-ups hint at the covert romance at the song’s center. Le Bon’s dynamic production embellishes the misanthropic paranoia that courses through centerpiece “Blood.” These elements prevent any sort of roteness from settling in unbidden, a pitfall that stream-of-consciousness can so easily fall prey to. The key principle is that Shaw’s meditations on mundanity never actually sound mundane.
Secret Love reaffirms Dry Cleaning’s underlying ethos that the ordinary is worth mining for the extraordinary. Standout moments couched in seemingly standard fare has been this band’s lingua franca since their inception. This notion achieves its full force on “Cruise Ship Designer,” an early highlight that documents the mostly banal thoughts of its titular character. They don’t personally like cruises, but they “want to serve a useful purpose.” They “desire very much a place in society.” On the surface, it’s a straightforward tune about a random occupation. But at its core, it explores the human necessity of belonging, and the darkness of finding that belonging through economic output and productivity. Shaw ends it with a kicker, a brief meta-commentary on her band’s inner mechanisms, granting us a peek behind the proverbial curtain: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work.”
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
