A cruise ship designer leaves secrets in the work. Someone else imagines hiding inside a flower. Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love is populated by people with private concerns that would complicate a perfectly normal conversation. Florence Shaw supplies the details, then leaves the awkwardness intact.
Cate Le Bon produced the record, released by 4AD in January 2026. The four musicians began writing together in Peckham, then worked through sessions in Chicago and Dublin before recording with Le Bon in France’s Loire Valley. Shaw’s words sit within a band built from Tom Dowse’s guitar, Lewis Maynard’s bass and Nick Buxton’s drums. The writing grew out of their exchanges in the room.
The Skinny’s Tony Inglis found the arrangements cautious beside Stumpwork, picking out the electronic elements of I Need You as a welcome disruption. That distinction is worth keeping. Shaw’s unusual characters give a song an immediate subject, but their presence alone cannot account for everything the band does around them.
July’s expanded edition adds Sliced by a Fingernail, Grass and I Have The Key. Shaw’s explanation of Sliced by a Fingernail is especially revealing: a person overwhelmed by attention fantasises about a huge flower bud as a hiding place. A fingernail pressing a brown mark into a petal supplied part of the image.
Shaw’s imagined refuge is fragile enough for a fingernail to bruise it. That small physical detail keeps the fantasy from becoming a comforting escape: somebody trying to avoid attention has chosen a hiding place that could easily be damaged. It is the kind of problem Dry Cleaning make memorable without resolving. Wanting to disappear has somehow created another thing to worry about.