After two albums produced by John Parrish, Dry Cleaning are back, three years later with their third, this time produced by Cate Le Bon. Let there be much rejoicing!
Can you, should you judge an album by its artwork? Their previous album, Stumpwork, had a front cover that featured a photograph of a bar of soap decorated with pubic hair spelling out the album title. This time round, the album’s cover artwork features a painting by the Scotland-based Canadian artist Erica Eyres, which shows the band’s frontwoman Florence Shaw having her eye washed by someone largely out of frame, holding Shaw’s eyelid open. Of course, if you only tend to stream or download, this may be a mute point, but is it her eyes that are being opened, or ours?
Quite possibly both, and that should be ears too; artwork showing ears being syringed would have been way too obvious, and the reality is that Dry Cleaning are not an obvious band. Having made two successful albums, they’ve taken their time with this one, and it’s paid off in spades.
That should have been obvious from the release of the opening track last year ‘Hit My Head All Day.’ For those who have yet to hear it, this six minute track served as a call to arms: we’re back, we’ve developed and we’ve moved up a gear or two. Its baseline is as funky as anything (think prime LCD Soundsystem or Tina Weymouth on either Talking Heads or Tom Tom Club records), and the lyrics that take in the mundane but also reach the surreal on a par with The Sugarcubes’ Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week.
There are some things that haven’t changed. Sure, there are still tracks you might not want to play in front of your more prudish relatives. Also (while it would be weird to simply love a group because of what they don’t sound like), it’s impressive that whilst they’ve made their most accessible and best album so far, in this case it is most definitely not a way of saying that they’ve shed their edges that made them so interesting and have become bland enough for mainstream acceptance. Both the band and Shaw have started singing (occasionally), but these are not songs to soundtrack your local beige indie disco. Frankly, it’s all the better for that.
It’s pointless to simply describe this as the first great album of 2026 when we’re not even two weeks in. It is, however, a record that will reward repeated playing, and one that will certainly win them new fans, and rewarding those long-term fans with how much they’ve developed. How long it will be to the next record is anyone’s guess, but we’ve got this and it’s brilliant. For best results, listen to with your eyes closed and just focus on one aspect at a time…
