I’ve always admired Dry Cleaning for their nerve. From the outset, they’ve been a band confident enough to trust in awkwardness, in dead space, and in a kind of anti-performance that resists easy listening. Secret Love continues that approach, though for me it does so with mixed results. There are moments here that I genuinely enjoy, and others where I feel the record loses momentum and never quite finds it again.
‘Hit My Head All Day’ is an excellent opener. I immediately latched onto the lead guitar, which feels loose, probing, and faintly menacing, evoking the pacing and patience of The Velvet Underground more than contemporary post-punk. I really like how confident the band sound inhabiting this disjointed instrumentalism, and Florence Shaw’s sometimes atonal, half-sung delivery works particularly well here. It feels deliberate, not mannered, and I am fully on board.
Things start to drift for me on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’. Lyrically it is recognisably Dry Cleaning, observational, ironic, faintly absurd, but musically I find the track inert. It feels like the album’s first loss of steam, and while I appreciate the conceptual angle, I am not convinced it earns its runtime.
‘My Soul / Half Pint’ is a more interesting one. There is no grand spark of inspiration here, but I find charm in its mundanity. Shaw singing about resenting cleaning as a woman, acknowledging the resentment, and then admitting it is something she has to get over feels oddly human. It is slight, but I respond to its honesty.
The title track, ‘Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)’, highlights a recurring issue I have with the album. Dry Cleaning execute spoken-word verses extremely well, but I often find the sung choruses less convincing. This song is a clear example of that imbalance. ‘Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit’, which lacks a conventional chorus altogether, falls into a similar category for me.
Tracks like ‘Blood’, ‘Evil Evil Idiot’, and ‘Rocks’ do little to win me back. ‘Evil Evil Idiot’ in particular starts promisingly but meanders into sludgy territory that I find more tiring than unsettling, even if that discomfort is intentional.
The record recovers somewhat with ‘The Cute Things’, where the songwriting tightens and the chorus finally works, and ‘I Need You’, which unfolds gently and with real warmth. ‘Joy’ closes the album meekly. I understand the appeal of its ironic randomness, but it simply does not land for me.
Secret Love is a thoughtful, sometimes frustrating listen. I respect its intent more than I enjoy it, and while it contains moments of real quality, I don’t think it coheres strongly enough to fully satisfy your ears.
Editors’ Picks
- Album Review
- British Bands
- contemporary indie
- Dry Cleaning
- Florence Shaw
- Post-Punk
- Secret Love
- Spoken Word
- UK alternative
