Photo by Max Miechowski

The intentionally sluggish drag behind the earliest previews of Dry Cleaning’s new album, Secret Love, have been a thing of artfully florid post-punk brilliance, even if the context painted in Florence Shaw’s deadpan is of our drab reality. There’s reason to believe that the album will at at least end with a hint of optimism on humanity’s assumed downward spiral into oblivion, however, and one that’s awakened by the thought with its final preview and closing track, “Joy”. Arguably one of the South London band’s most electrically jolted listens yet, the spiral swoops up in the wiry clangor made all the more sculptured in Cate Le Bon’s production hands. “We’ll build a cutе harmless world / A cute harmless world / And I don’t want one from you, cult,” Shaw promises in its tail end. That’s one way to make the life you want.

Directed by: Cuan Roche

Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love will be released January 9th on 4AD.