Secret Love (Dry Cleaning album)

Secret Love is the upcoming third studio album by the English band Dry Cleaning. It is scheduled for release on 9 January 2026 through 4AD Records and was produced by the Welsh musician Cate Le Bon.^[1] Following Stumpwork (2022) by more than three years, it will be their first album not to be produced by John Parish.

For their first two albums, New Long Leg (2021) and Stumpwork (2022), Dry Cleaning worked with producer John Parish, and the band decided that for their third, they would benefit from experimenting with new producers. In December 2025, their vocalist and lyricist Florence Shaw said told Mojo magazine:

When New Long Leg came out, it was a very insular world. Its recording was quarantine-sensitive – we were all in a bubble with John ... That kind of atmosphere was still weighing quite heavily on the process, even on our second record. So beyond just meeting other musicians at festivals, we wanted to see what actually working with people would be like.^[2]

After a performance at Chicago's Pitchfork Music Festival in 2022, they were greeted by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy backstage, who was a fan and invited them to visit his nearby studio, The Loft. At the time, Wilco were in the process of recording their album Cousin (2023), which was being produced by the Welsh musician Cate Le Bon who was also there. Shaw had known of Le Bon as a producer for years but no one from Dry Cleaning had met her until then.^[3]

In 2024, following a performance at Wilco's Solid Sound Festival where they were joined onstage by Nels Cline, the band returned to The Loft and recorded a jam to explore new potential material.^[4] They also explored other options, recording demos at Sonic Studios in Dublin with members of the Gilla Band^[1] and briefly working at The Fish Factory in London.^[4] By then, Dry Cleaning had around twenty tracks recorded but were still undecided on a producer. They ultimately chose Le Bon, who convinced them to completely re-record everything they had.^[5]

After developing the material with Le Bon in a north London rehearsal space,^[4] they recorded Secret Love with her in mid-2025^[a] at Black Box Studios in the Loire Valley in France, reducing the total number of tracks to eleven.^[5] According to Shaw, sessions at the farmhouse studio were "intense" but "focused", largely due to how their sleeping arrangements were about a thirty-second walk away.^[2]

The album's cover artwork was painted by the Scotland-based Canadian artist Erica Eyres. It depicts the band's singer Florence Shaw having her eye washed by someone largely out of frame, holding Shaw's eyelid open.^[4]

Secret Love was officially announced on 29 September 2025 with the release of its lead single, the six-minute-long "Hit My Head All Day".^[1] Shortly afterwards, for the last show of a U.S. tour in early October, the band performed three other album tracks ("My Soul / Half Pint", "Evil Evil Idiot", and "Joy") at Warsaw in Brooklyn, New York.^[6]

A second single, "Cruise Ship Designer", was released on 11 November 2025 with a Cuán Roche-directed video featuring the band's bassist Lewis Maynard,^[7] then on 9 December, they released "Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit" as the third single, with a video starring the Chicago-based musician Bruce Lamont who also contributed saxophone to the track.^[8] All three videos were choreographed by Bullyache.^[1][7][8]

In support of the album, Dry Cleaning announced a 2026 tour, starting on 3 January at the Rockaway Beach Festival in Bognor Regis, England and headlining several dates. Originally, they were scheduled to perform in North America from late January to February, with YHWH Nailgun as the supporting act.^[9] However, upon releasing their third single in December 2025, the band announced that they had to reschedule that leg of the tour, citing "a number of factors, not least of which the increasingly hostile economic forces that govern touring in the present day." The majority of the North American dates were moved to late April and May.^[8]

In Uncut, Stuart Stubbs said that in 2021, upon their "impressive" debut album New Long Leg, "there was a sense that ... [they] would struggle to surprise a second time", but after a successful second album, their third "obliterates the thought entirely", rating Secret Love 9 out of 10 and calling it "the most varied (and often delicate) the band has ever sounded."^[12] Victoria Segal of Mojo awarded the album five stars and thought that, despite the continued expansion their sound, "Dry Cleaning have lost none of their distinctive edge, their idiosyncratic set-up proving to be endlessly elastic, as big as they want, as small as they need, to capture the chaos of the world."^[2]

In a four-star review for Record Collector, Shaun Curran said that, given the band's increasingly expansive trajectory combined with the "excellent production" from Cate Le Bon, Secret Love is the band's "best work yet" and that "Shaw's lyrics are still some of the most imaginative in alternative music".^[11] In another four-star review, Bella Martin of DIY thought that while "It's not a record likely to shift anyone's needle on Dry Cleaning," Le Bon's production "offers an – if not fresh, then comfortably renewed – extra layer to dive into."^[10]

Credits are adapted from Apple Music,^[b] except where noted.

• Florence Shaw – vocals
• Lewis Maynard – bass; vocals (tracks 1–2)
• Nick Buxton – percussion, programming, vocals (1–2); synthesiser (1); keyboards (2); drums, piano (3)
• Tom Dowse – guitar; vocals

• Cate Le Bon – production; programming (1–2)
• Jeff Tweedy – guitar (3)^[2]
• Bruce Lamont – tenor saxophone (5)
• Samur Khouja – engineering
• David Wrench – mixing
• Heba Kadry – mastering
• Erica Eyres – cover artwork^[4]