Riveting post-punk pop, fuelled by artwork, nervousness and “low-cost chocolate mousse”. Sharon O’Connell talks to DRY CLEANING about their latest album New Lengthy Leg, beforehand in our JANUARY 2022 concern of Uncut, available for purchase right here.
“Now that we have now data out and are signed to a label, it’s exhausting to speak simply how informal the entire thing was,” says Florence Shaw, nonetheless with a faint word of marvel in her voice, 4 years on. The singer is contemplating the early days of London four-piece Dry Cleansing, whose deadpan title belies the driving post-punk pressure of their music and the intimate nature of Shaw’s lyrics, as exemplified by their 2021 debut, New Lengthy Leg.
Shaw was – and nonetheless is – a visible artist with no prior band expertise when she was invited by pal Tom Dowse (guitar) to affix the kickabout weekend undertaking he had with Lewis Maynard (bass) and Nick Buxton (drums). Buxton texted her hyperlinks to tracks – together with Grace Jones’ “Personal Life” and “Guys Are Not Proud” by Alaskan punks The Anemic Boyfriends – which had been “extra an invite to be artistic in my method to being a frontperson than references as to what I ought to do within the band, reminding me that I didn’t essentially need to belt it out”. Their first group rehearsal in October of 2017 was “an instantaneous factor the place we had been excited by the sound all 4 of us made collectively”.
The 2019 EPs Candy Princess and Boundary Street Snacks And Drinks discovered them exploring a spread of moody sounds – Pleasure Division, Sonic Youth, MBV – with Shaw’s disaffected vocals a defining characteristic, together with a lyrical obsession with meals. New Lengthy Leg’s smörgåsbord contains an outdated sandwich, a Twix and oven chips (in “Scratchcard Lanyard”), sausages, “low-cost chocolate mousse” and “crappy, loopy pizzas”. “Lots of my writing comes from daydreaming,” Shaw admits, “simply letting my thoughts wander. Or it may be far more direct, whereby I simply transcribe ideas and emotions as they arrive after which edit. That’s an enormous a part of what I do – it’s primarily modifying, really. My writing is meant to be accessible; I don’t need it to be mysterious, so it’s potential the meals is there to say one thing direct.”
As she has it, the title Dry Cleansing speaks to “the overall theme throughout the band of one thing extraordinary and unusual on the identical time”. All admit to a sure degree of peculiarly understated theatricality, too: “Lewis specifically typically talks concerning the band not simply being one thing the place you may have your personal little second of self-expression however the place you talk with individuals, as an outward-facing factor. That’s an vital factor we discuss loads.”
Their second album, once more with John Parish within the producer’s chair, is already properly underway. Shaw reveals that “the sound has actually advanced, so there are extra shorter and maybe extra joyful songs. We’ve had fairly a tough yr by way of our private lives – we’ve suffered a couple of losses – and I believe in an odd means it’s galvanised us. We discovered loads concerning the issues we maintain shut, I suppose.” Of Dry Cleansing’s studio course of, Shaw cheerfully admits that “it’s exhausting work on all fronts. We’re all people and we attempt to act as a democracy, typically talking, so which means there’s a hell of plenty of dialogue and a hell of plenty of push and pull. It’s not a good looking, symbiotic course of the entire time however I believe all of us thrive on that. It’s the place the enjoyment is, as properly.”
New Lengthy Leg is out now on 4AD.
