I am staring at the band Dry Cleaning, appropriately enough, across a mountain of food. The south London four-piece are known for their distinctive, enveloping post-punk overlaid with hypnotic spoken word lyrics that are by turns profound, poetic, and replete with references to snacks: hotdogs, old sandwiches, Alpen, pancakes, £17 mushrooms, cheap chocolate mousse. One of their most important discussions, about whether to continue with the band in earnest rather than as a fun pastime, happened in a Wimpy. “The big Wimpy meeting,” remembers drummer Nick Buxton. “I went past it the other day. They should have a blue plaque now.”
It’s a good thing they did decide to persist with the band. Their debut album, New Long Leg, recorded with PJ Harvey producer John Parish, was released to rave reviews in April 2021 and made many end-of-year lists; it was named Rough Trade’s album of the year and the New York Times described vocalist Florence Shaw as “weaving the random linguistic detritus of modern life into loose, surreal narratives”. They have many famous fans, including Marina Abramović, Suede’s Brett Anderson and Grace Jones, who chose them for her Meltdown festival earlier this summer. “It’s almost like everyone feels that Dry Cleaning is that band they found in lockdown,” says guitarist Tom Dowse. Their fans refer to themselves as “bouncy balls”, a nod to their mesmerising single Scratchcard Lanyard: “It’s a Tokyo bouncy ball / It’s an Oslo bouncy ball / It’s a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball”.
Today we are meeting at a pizzeria in Camberwell, the table piled high with enormous black olives, burrata, jalapeños, pizzas, Sardinian lager and tiramisus, to discuss their second album, Stumpwork. “We bond over food a lot. It’s a big part of the band. Big time,” says bassist Lewis Maynard, before announcing that he has Italian heritage – something Shaw had warned me he would do. There is a feeling of warmth and mutual affection between everyone around the table, the sense that they have been friends for a long time and still enjoy one another’s company. Shaw had to be persuaded to join the band; unlike the others, her background is in art rather than music, and she felt intimidated by the immediacy of the medium. “One of the main things I was trying to communicate was that it was small: we rehearse in a garage and we eat a lot and we play Fifa,” says Dowse, who met Shaw at the Royal College of Art in 2010 when they were both students. “I was kind of persistent with it, mainly because I could tell Flo was interested.”
Part of the reassurance was that she would not have to sing: the three band members had tried vocalising over the music, but then decided to try something different (“That was a Sliding Doors moment,” says Dowse. “We’d be playing a gig tonight at the New Cross Inn”). For a decade, Shaw had been collecting striking phrases she overheard or read or saw online, noting them down on her phone; she brought a printout of these to a rehearsal, and while she was dithering Buxton started to read them out as the rest of the band played around him. “I was just trying to ignite your competitive streak,” he says.
“Probably I was like, ‘Oh, I can do it better than that,’” says Shaw, laughing. “I was either inspired or repulsed, I’m not sure. But then I felt a bit more courageous. And we just gave it a go.”
Looking back on those early rehearsals, Shaw recalls it as a time of turmoil, in which her style of delivery was instinctive rather than carefully choreographed. “My personal life was slightly falling apart, so rehearsing was a footnote to all of that. I almost have to post-rationalise why I do it this way – it’s kind of like archaeology.” A few key influences she has identified include Jonathan Meades (“his whole style is to stand somewhere, kind of awkward, and be stoic and say a lot of words”), Will Powers (comedy music alter ego of photographer Lynn Goldsmith), rapper Noname (“tender but completely unflinching”) and poet Chelsey Minnis (“her poems are almost like little tantrums”). In her lyrics, Shaw looks for jarring juxtapositions and humour (“you have to find it funny over a period of months”), but she also digs deep to find more uncomfortable truths: “There are some ways of being revealing that feel a bit calculated – I’m guilty of it too – so I’ll try to be very careful about weeding out anything that feels self-serving. I like including things that are a bit uglier than that, or where I’m revealing something pretty unsavoury about myself, though it might wind up being in the form of a riddle or in code.”
That combination of propulsive instrumentation, sometimes melodic, sometimes ominous, and Shaw’s vocals – by turns cantankerous, vulnerable and deadpan – immediately clicked. Once they had found their sound, the writing flowed organically, recorded on Voice Memos then refined. They had an early hit with 2019 debut single Magic of Meghan, written about Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement while Shaw’s own relationship was falling apart (there are no plans for further songs about the royals: “They’re not super inspiring, are they?”). They released a couple of EPs, signed to 4AD and were rapidly gaining momentum when the pandemic struck. The band were touring in the States and flew back to an uncertain future; they had just given up their day jobs – Shaw and Dowse lecturing at university, Buxton building furniture and Maynard working with adults with learning disabilities – and found themselves in a reality where the viability of live music itself was in question.
The next few months were strange (“I lit a lot of candles,” says Shaw), but being in the band gave them an escape. Two months in, they started rehearsing in a large, social distancing-friendly room; that summer, they recorded the album over two weeks at Rockfield studios in rural Wales, where they watched a lot of Naked Attraction. When New Long Leg came out the following spring, live music was still largely off the cards, so for many listeners it became associated with lockdown. Although it was unusual to put out an album in these circumstances, the band didn’t have anything to compare it with: “We’re finding out now that things are different when it’s not a pandemic,” says Shaw. Once the band were free to tour, they found that their hyper-specific brand of British humour connected with audiences from Poland to Mexico City. “They know all the words,” says Shaw. “People in France were losing their minds.”
Stumpwork – named after a slightly naff style of embroidery – is likely to expand their audiences even further. It builds on their existing sound, widening the band’s palette to encompass elements of funk, psych and jazz, and even the odd bit of singing from Shaw. “It’s a slightly different ingredient that I enjoy putting in specific songs: I sort of use it as a surprise. But I’m not a skilled singer.” She laughs. “It’s almost incidental singing that anyone might do – it’s singing to myself more than, like, projecting.” The lyrics are also a little bit more direct, touching on police brutality and violence against women in one line before abruptly becoming more oblique again. One timely song is called Conservative Hell. “It was relevant when we wrote it, and it’s relevant now, it’s going to be relevant next year. I mean, Jesus Christ.”
“Maybe they could use that as their theme,” adds Buxton.
But the album is also full of light moments and droll non-sequiturs (“We’re in the middle of what they call three financial eclipses / Is it still OK to call you my disco pickle?”). Lead single Gary Ashby is a bittersweet two-minute bop about a missing tortoise, inspired by a lost pet poster Shaw spotted on the street. Kwenchy Kups is an upbeat-sounding song in which Shaw announces: “Things are shit but they’re gonna be OK / And I’m gonna see the otters / There aren’t any otters.” They ascribe this lightness to the context in which the album was written: the death of Dowse’s grandfather and Maynard’s mother, Susan, whose garage they had used to rehearse in.
“It’s hard to pinpoint what influence that year had,” says Maynard. “Even on the day before she died we were in the studio, and then we were back writing two weeks later. So it’s impossible for it not to have had an impact.” They found that they moved towards music that felt joyful to counteract what was happening outside of the rehearsal room. “For me the grief mixes with the joy,” says Dowse. “Whenever I play Kwenchy Kups it’s got such a joyful chord progression, it makes me think of Susan and my grandad. Grief doesn’t always have to be this slow, sombre thing, it can also be quite joyful, especially if those people made it abundantly clear how proud they were of you.”
Being in a band, he says, provides a powerful release for negative emotions. “I don’t have to put things into words. If you talked to a therapist, you’d have to say it somehow. Whereas with music, you don’t have to struggle to find the word, you just let things come out. That’s one of the reasons I play guitar: because it’s easy to express yourself on it.” Shaw agrees, although she adds that their newfound notoriety “brings a whole new raft of stuff which is different and quite difficult to deal with: problems around exposure, or dealing with your own face and body – things that certainly don’t come up in the same way in a normal job.” There is an expectation that you can be photographed at any given moment. “That sounds like such a whinge, but en masse it can be quite a lot. It can do things to your brain sometimes.”
Still, one word that comes up time and time again during the interview is “lucky”. Releasing their first album in their early 30s rather than a decade earlier means that they are aware of how rare this experience is. They look back on that big Wimpy meeting with fondness; they may laugh about the idea of a blue plaque now, but it’s probably only a matter of time.
“It’s wonderful to write something that’s emotional and personal and make yourself quite vulnerable,” says Shaw, “and for people to respond well, and to relate to it and enjoy it and tell you that it’s been a helpful thing for them to listen to. That still stuns me all the time and it is a very nice feeling. It’s such a mixed bag. It’s everything: good and bad and crazy.”
Stumpwork is out now on 4AD. Dry Cleaning will tour the UK next February
