Dry Cleaning: 2026

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Dry Cleaning's Secret Love is 2026's first truly great album of this still-young year, a brave and nimble third album that distills these times of catastrophic chaos with gravity, rough beauty, and unflinching insight. All 11 songs masterfully lash together the personal and the political into a taut bow of confessional anguish and resistance. Dry Cleaning's wit is still discernible, but so is the hurt of witnessing a world riven by war, deception, and rhetorical aggression.

Major global events have always trailed Dry Cleaning — back on March 6, 2020, the quartet, who'd just signed to 4AD on the back of their two EPs, 2018's Sweet Princess and 2019's Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, was the last band to play in FUV's Studio A before the pandemic lockdown. That day is forever etched in shared memory, as the quartet and their manager anxiously checked their phones, awaiting the fate of their showcases at SXSW 2020 (cancelled) and unsure if they could still safely do their Seattle and Los Angeles gigs or even get home to Britain.

Four years later, at SXSW 2024, a year in which which many bands pulled out in protest regarding some of the festival's sponsors. Dry Cleaning chose to perform, but also used their platform at the Radio Day Stage to eloquently speak out against the mix of music, military, and arms manufacturers.

Leaping to 2025, Dry Cleaning's Florence Shaw (vocals), Tom Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass), Nick Buxton (drums) and touring keyboardist Josh Eggerton arrived at WFUV to play a trio of songs from the band's third album, Secret Love: lead single "Hit My Head All Day," recent single "Joy," and "Evil Evil Idiot."

They also chatted about working with producer Cate Le Bon, and a shared goal of changing the ways they've played (or vocalized) in the past, and their Wilco studio connection. There was also frank talk of tsunami of current events that drove the evolution of Secret Love and what Dry Cleaning wanted — and needed — to express. "A small alarm goes off when something needs to be said," says Shaw.

[Recorded: 10/3/25. Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Thomas Lapus, Nadia Garriga  and Holden Buckley. Produced by Meghan Suma. Videographers: Bella Lipayon, Alena Godas, Gina Slavin and Nikki Phillips.]