Dry Cleaning have always sounded like a band thinking out loud, but on Secret Love, that internal monologue becomes something both stranger and more assured. Produced by Cate Le Bon, the south London four piece’s new album feels like a group of songs created through shared intuition, captured when the chemistry burned brightest.

The record began modestly in Peckham rehearsal spaces, with Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton, and bassist Lewis Maynard writing in the room together. That detail matters. In Dry Cleaning’s world, music and lyrics are inseparable forces, shaping and provoking each other in real time. Shaw’s famously deadpan spoken delivery does not sit on top of the music. It moves inside it, nudged and redirected by every rhythmic shift and tonal decision.

From there, Secret Love expanded geographically and sonically. Sessions at Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio The Loft brought new touches, while time at Sonic Studios in Dublin with Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox pushed the band into different territory. Each space leaves its mark on the record. You can hear the rooms working on the songs, stretching them, unsettling them, sharpening their edges. The process culminated with Cate Le Bon at Black Box in the Loire Valley, where the album’s final textures truly settled in.

If Stumpwork hinted at Dry Cleaning’s ambitions, Secret Love delivers on them. There’s the twitchy paranoia of early Eighties American punk and hardcore, but with a distinctly British restraint. There is a loose, almost insolent guitar strut that nods toward Keith Richards, brushed up against stoner rock vibes, no wave playfulness, dystopian darkness, and moments of unexpectedly pastoral fingerpicking.

Throughout, Shaw’s voice remains the album’s most distinctive instrument. Her delivery is studiously calibrated to the band’s shifting soundscapes, placing her in a lineage of spoken word artists that stretches from Laurie Anderson to Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins. She observes rather than confesses, letting meaning accumulate through repetition, misdirection, and timing. The effect is hypnotic. You lean in, not because she raises her voice, but because she never does. More than anything, Secret Love feels like the purest expression yet of the friendships that define Dry Cleaning. This is a band deeply attuned to one another, unafraid of tension or contradiction.