“Oddballs,” says Florence Shaw over her tomato juice. “I hope oddballs listen to our music and feel some kind of kinship.” Despite resembling normal people having a few drinks in London Bridge, south London’s own alt-rock heroes Dry Cleaning are hardly what you’d call a normal band, if we think of normal bands today as an open-shirted lot who write “anthems” and make a big deal about smoking (no 1975s mentioned).
While every guitar band call themselves post-punk now, Dry Cleaning are most like the original post-punk bands, being a gang of art school oddballs who combine the bookish with the psychotic. Their songs stretch indie pop into avant-garde places, all held together with Shaw’s impressionistic spoken word delivery, which makes it all feel like Joan Didion fronting The Fall; as if that cool observer of generational malaise has suddenly been handed the mic.
