When Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning joins the call with Lewis Maynard and myself, there is something wonderfully, accidentally existential about her first question: “Am I the right way up?”. It lands with the same poetry as one of her lyrics, the kind of line that sounds observational and absurd until it suddenly opens onto something devastating beneath it. One can imagine it nestled comfortably amongst the uncanny domestic details and emotional after images that have come to define Dry Cleaning’s work, that peculiar ability to locate profundity within the awkward, the exhausted and often the painfully ordinary.
Emerging from South London in 2018, Dry Cleaning rapidly distinguished themselves from their contemporaries with early releases, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, introduced Shaw’s singular spoken delivery, a voice capable of transforming grocery lists, social anxieties and fragments of overheard conversation into something hypnotic and emotionally loaded. Their debut album, New Long Leg arrived in 2021, produced by the incredible John Parish, and closely followed up Stumpwork, and most recently Secret Love, produced by the equally incredible Cate Le Bon.
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Now, ahead of their long-awaited return to Australia for Vivid Sydney, the band arrive carrying the weight and momentum of constant movement. They will perform as part of the festival’s music program alongside a run of headline dates. When we speak, Shaw and Maynard are somewhere between cities, countries and states of consciousness, exhausted but warm, still visibly surprised by the fact the band remains not only intact, but emotionally connected. Whilst Maynard confesses to exhaustion is it not one that excludes the band’s gratitude. Both Shaw and Maynard repeatedly return to the idea that Dry Cleaning are still surprised by what the band has become, and perhaps even more surprised by the fact that audiences continue to follow them deeper into increasingly strange and emotionally expansive territory.
“They’ve been so fun,” Maynard says of the recent run of shows. “We’ve got lots of new places, like places for the first time, so it’s been cool.”
Australia, in particular, occupies a strangely sentimental place in the band’s history. Before the acclaim, before the records and relentless touring schedules, it was Australian radio, (and RUSSH obviously) that first embraced them. “Our first ever interviews were with Australian radio stations,” Shaw recalls. “We seem to connect with Australia before anywhere else.”
“Our first ever interviews were with Australian radio stations. We seem to connect with Australia before anywhere else.”
We begin to discuss Secret Love and the sonic shift between production style and tone between the records is notable. While the skeletal tension of the earlier work remains intact, there is now significantly more emotional air within the songs, more softness, melancholy and strange beauty floating between the edges. Whilst the band loved working with Parish, and could have made a third with him, they wanted to explore as Maynard says “you never know how many records you're going to get to make really.”
There is something refreshingly unromantic about the way Dry Cleaning speak about ambition. Nothing is framed in terms of grand reinvention or calculated artistic evolution. Instead, their process appears rooted almost entirely in responsiveness, to each other, to opportunity, to emotional instinct. “We're really good at reacting as a band,” Shaw says. “We're really good at reacting to each other and to ourselves and what we create. I think we're good at reacting to opportunities.”
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Working with Le Bon, they explain, felt less like the imposition of a new vision and more like discovering someone already emotionally aligned with the material they had begun creating. “She totally responded to the fact that we had written songs that were quite emotional,” Shaw says. “She used the word ‘beautiful’ a lot, and that was a new way of talking about demos for us.” Importantly, Shaw is quick to stress that Le Bon did not impose romanticism onto the material so much as recognise it already existed there. “It wasn't so much that she brought that to the record,” she explains. “It was more like we kind of mirrored each other in that way.”
For Maynard, Le Bon possessed an unusual ability to articulate emotional ideas the band themselves had not yet fully understood.“She kind of understood things that we hadn't been able to communicate,” he says. “She kind of seemed to communicate for us.” That communication process became almost ritualistic during recording. Before sessions formally began, the five collaborators spent an entire day simply listening to music together, building what Maynard describes as “a communal language” for the album, describing the day as “vital.”
Their references were eclectic and hyper-specific, ranging from obscure recordings to isolated production details. Drone music became particularly influential, informing a series of daily improvisational exercises undertaken each morning during recording. “We did twenty-minute recordings where we would all improvise on a theme,” Maynard says. “A drone or a note or a beat on a drum machine.” Shaw continues, “it really brings everyone together on the same page so early in the day,” she says. “It was really pressure-less. You pick up a random instrument you didn't know how to play and just play away at it.”
"We did twenty-minute recordings where we would all improvise on a theme. A drone or a note or a beat on a drum machine.”
The process sounds almost therapeutic, which makes the transition into touring life all the more jarring. If recording represented a cloistered world of intuition and experimentation, touring appears more akin to controlled psychological erosion. “Touring is like being shaken,” Shaw says. “If you've got any loose bits, they tend to fall off if you're not careful.” Somewhat paradoxically, the emotional openness cultivated during recording has seemingly transferred itself into the live shows.
The band speak with genuine surprise about the tenderness of audience reactions to newer material. “A lot of our shows, people react quite emotionally,” Shaw says. “You can see out of the corner of your eye people hugging each other on certain tracks. “We've got this song called Let Me Grow which seems to make people quite emotional.”
There is almost disbelief in her voice while describing it. Perhaps because Dry Cleaning’s music has so often been framed externally as ironic, cerebral or detached, the emotional vulnerability at the centre of it occasionally catches even the band themselves off guard.“I don't think I necessarily expected that,” Shaw admits with Maynard continuing “the audiences are so varied. It's amazing.”
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The relationship between band and audience appears especially meaningful given the increasingly hostile realities of contemporary touring life. Across the music industry, artists speak openly about burnout, financial instability and emotional exhaustion. Simply surviving long enough to remain a functioning touring band now feels like a minor miracle.“There’s also something about the four of us being in bizarre places together that gets me sometimes,” Maynard says. He describes accidentally making prolonged eye contact with bandmate Nick Buxton during a recent performance due to an altered stage setup. “We don't really smile or make eye contact usually,” he laughs. “It's really emotional,” Maynard continues. “The unit travelling around and looking after each other.”
In contrast to iconic rock n’ roll cliches of brothers or bandmates loathing one another, there seems to be genuine affection between them, though it is filtered through the same understated humour and self-awareness that runs through Dry Cleaning’s music itself. Even discussions of emotional survival quickly collapse into deadpan comedy. “It could have imploded in a dramatic way so easily,” Shaw says of the band dynamic. “I think we're all pretty proud that we're in one piece and still enjoy each other's company and know each other's families and that it's not fucked.” The blunt simplicity of the statement ‘not being fucked’ causes mutual laughter.
If Shaw’s writing often explores fragmented identity and shifting perspectives, I’m curious whether those same transformations consciously enter her live performance. Across Dry Cleaning’s catalogue, narrators blur and perspectives change, with some songs feeling autobiographical, others theatrical and absurd or observational. “I think it is a conscious switching,” Shaw says. “But that's also a lot of the fun of performing.” She describes live performance almost as an exercise in emotional shapeshifting. “Thinking about who you are in each song and where the words are coming from,” she explains. “Whether they're coming from inside, or whether they're designed to make people laugh, or confuse people. I suppose it's all me in a way,” she says. “Everything one makes is some strange corner of yourself coming out.”
“Thinking about who you are in each song and where the words are coming from – whether they're coming from inside, or whether they're designed to make people laugh, or confuse people – I suppose it's all me in a way. Everything one makes is some strange corner of yourself coming out.
It is perhaps the clearest articulation of what makes Shaw such a singular lyricist. Her writing rarely presents emotion directly. Instead, feelings arrive refracted through observation, humour, contradiction and displacement. The performance becomes a conduit through which unconscious emotional truths emerge indirectly. “It's a conduit for thoughts and feelings you didn't know you had,” she says. She describes songs as “emotional overspill”, fragments of unresolved feeling transformed into language and sound.“I think it's really good to keep hold of that as much as you can,” she says. “No matter how many times you play a song.” Maynard confesses that certain tracks still visibly affect him while performing, though mostly he attempts to disguise it as sweat. “I've definitely hidden tears in some sweat,” he says.
The conversation eventually circles toward the idea of trust, a word both return to repeatedly when discussing the emotional core of their latest work. Not trust in some abstract spiritual sense, but trust earned gradually through years of collaboration, exhaustion and creative uncertainty.“A lot of the playfulness [on the new record] came from the trust,” Maynard explains. He describes the band’s songwriting process as “fishing”, spending hours improvising, searching patiently through chaos for brief moments of accidental beauty. “You can go through shit for an hour,” he says, “but if you get thirty seconds of something amazing at the end, that's worth it.” Importantly, those moments are often only recognisable in retrospect he explains, “a lot of our writing comes from going back and listening to jams and picking out the moments where there was good communication and good connection.”
As our conversation draws to a close, Shaw returns once more to the fragile improbability of the band’s continued existence. “Touring life, you can be tired and bitchy and just want to go to bed,” she says. “To get to a point where we're all in a good place is not a given.” In many ways, Dry Cleaning’s music has always existed within precisely that tension, between absurdity and sincerity, alienation and intimacy, humour and grief. They remain masters of locating emotional truth inside awkwardness, exhaustion and everyday disorientation, often avoiding being the right way up.
Dry Cleaning will play the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Sydney on Friday 29 May. Tickets and show details are available via the Vivid Sydney website. Tickets and show details for the rest of their Australian tour dates are available on the Dry Cleaning website.
