Secret Love

Produced by Cate Le Bon, Secret Love started life in Peckham rehearsal spaces, all members - frontperson Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard - writing, playing and responding to each other in the room: in Dry Cleaning, music and lyrics form an inseparable, generative whole. The follow-up to Stumpwork evolved through affirming sessions at Jeff Tweedy's Chicago studio the Loft and explosive ones with Gilla Band's Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox at Sonic Studios in Dublin, taking advantage of the sonic particulars of each space, and finally with Cate Le Bon at Black Box in the Loire Valley.Secret Love is the finest expression yet of the profound friendships that created Dry Cleaning. Here, the south London four-piece take their place in rock's avant garde, catalysing the Reaganite paranoia of early 80s US punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave and pastoral fingerpicking, while Florence's delivery, meticulously calibrated to her bandmates' soundscapes, asserts her in a lineage of spoken-word artists stretching from Laurie Anderson to Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins.