DRY CLEANING

Matteo Pini As Dry Cleaning, food has been central to the music you’ve made. Your second EP was entitled Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks (2019), and your last album Stumpwork (2022) featured references to pancakes, Alpen, Kwenchy Kups and “peaceful fish meat lying dead and flat in a chiller”. Were there any notable meals involved in the creation of your new album, Secret Love? 
Nick Buxton When we recorded it, we were being looked after at the studio by a very lovely lady called Sylvie, who cooked every meal from scratch.
Lewis Maynard We learned quite quickly that you can’t have a cheeseboard with every meal.
Florence Shaw  There was so much cheese! Breakfast cheese, lunch cheese, wine, breads and crisps… 
Tom Dowse So many crisps. The crisp journey continues to this day.

MP You road-tested songs with different musicians, including Gilla Band and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. How did this contribute to the progression of the record?
FS Having made the previous two albums with John Parish, which was great, we wanted to try working with different people. We wrote a lot of disparate-sounding songs that we didn’t want to smooth out: we wanted each to keep its own character. We chose collaborators based on what would best suit each song. The ones we showed to Jeff Tweedy in The Loft in Chicago are the more pastoral, countrified songs. The songs that were more nascent we took to Gilla Band in Dublin. Their approach is so cut-up and fragmented, it felt perfect for shaping songs that didn’t have a clear structure.

MP Cate le Bon contributed to the production of the album – tell me about her involvement.
LM We met for the first time at The Loft: Jeff Tweedy had invited us down. When we were touring in Chicago, we popped in, and Cate was producing Wilco’s record Cousin. When we demoed the tracks, we had a list of producers we wanted to work with, and her name hadn’t left our minds. We had some Zoom chats, and she seemed to connect with the work quickly. One of our biggest fears was that because John Parish cared about the first two records so much, from start to finish, we were worried someone wouldn’t care as much. She really did.
FS At the start of every day, we’d do half an hour of improvised recording, where everyone chose a particular sound to mess around with, which I really enjoyed. You weren’t going into a session cold, which never goes that well anyway.
LM So much of being in the studio is about language. When a producer comes in, they have to learn the internal language of a band. With Cate, before we did any sessions, we spent a whole day listening to music together, which helped build a shared understanding. She understood that when you’re talking about music, trying to get someone to understand what you feel in your mind by just using words is very difficult. She’s had a great ability to play or show you something that helps you understand what you’re trying to achieve. She could say, “It needs to sound more Belgian”, and we would understand.
TD There’s definitely more of an anarcho-punk vibe on this record, not necessarily in terms of sonics, but in how experimental that genre of music could be. We had discussions about bands like Normil Hawaiians and Wipers. Lou Reed, and the 1970s Bowie records like Low, all these cold, brutalist records.

MP FS It’s funny you mention 1970s Bowie and anarcho-punk – in my listening notes I’ve written “Brian Eno-ish” and “oily” to describe the album’s tone. 
FS That’ll be all the cheese. 

MP I was struck by the song “Cruise Ship Designer”, which details a man whose obsession with designing cruise ships leads him to believe he is changing the world, even though he doesn’t like them. It resonates both as a send-up of bullshit jobs and an interrogation of the life of the artist: toiling in semi-anonymity, climbing the ladder, maintaining a kind of deluded assumption that anyone should care about the work. 
FS The song isn’t meant to be attacking a person like that; it seems to be a mode that’s pretty normal at this point, especially for people in arts-adjacent jobs. It’s hard to find a job that doesn’t have some awful side effects on the world, and cruise ships are an extreme end of that wedge.

MP There’s always been violence lingering in the corners of your songs, counterbalanced by a “mustn’t grumble” sensibility. As the world has become more turbulent, have you found your lyrics reflecting this?
FS I haven’t knowingly changed my process as a response, but I think it’s impossible not to. I feel very affected by how much livestreamed violence there is from Palestine or that stupid fucking Unite the Kingdom thing. Some of the worst things I’ve ever seen have been on my phone over the past two years, and I find it impossible not to be affected by that in almost every conceivable way.

MP The album is entitled Secret Love. Does that refer to a private affection or a faith kept hidden? How do you interpret the title?
FS It means something slightly different to all of us. The concept of secret feelings – the specialness of totally private things – is something I find very appealing. It’s romantic, in a way. 
NB I don’t think the album is soppy – it has a lot of hard edges – but there is a slightly more romantic aspect to this album, and that is something we haven’t really done before.
TD My take on it is more dystopian, the idea that love has to be kept secret. It makes me think of the book 1984 by George Orwell, where Winston falling in love with Julia is his vulnerability: that’s how the powerful weed him out. Pure feelings are proof that we’re human and will also probably be our downfall.

Secret Love is out on 9th January 2026 on 4AD. Dry Cleaning will be playing Simple Things on 8th November.