Dry Cleaning Retrace Their Steps

Before we crowned them the Best of What’s Next in 2019 and before they put out back-to-back heavy-hitter records—New Long Leg and Stumpwork—in 2021 and 2022, Dry Cleaning formed in South London after members Lewis Maynard, Tom Dowse and Nick Buxton all met and struck up a band for the hell of it in 2017. Vocalist Florence Shaw had met Buxton and Maynard while she was a student at Camberwell and they were enrolled at Goldsmiths, while Dowse knew her from their time at the Royal College of Art together in the early 2010s.

After months of convincing, Shaw came on as a lead singer, Dry Cleaning adopted their SEO nightmare of a band name and released their first-ever single, “Magic of Meghan,” two years later. Just last month, the four-piece—along with Rottingdean Bazaar and Annie Collinge—took home a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package for Stumpwork, an album cover brandishing a bar of soap with the project’s title spelled out in loose hair. It was a massive exclamation point on a whirlwind 36 months. Now, the band is about to embark on a two-and-a-half-month tour of North America and Europe in support of their 2019 EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks. Yes, you read that right.

In August 2019, Dry Cleaning recorded Sweet Princess in one day at Total Refreshment Centre with producer Kristian Craig Robinson, who owed the band a favor after Buxton did some bass work for him on a different project. They went into the space for only a few hours, not with any intent to put out a record, but to capture what the band had achieved together up until that point. What does Dry Cleaning remember from their first-ever session together? “Buying too many snacks,” Maynard chuckles. “I remember Kristian looking at us with a bit of shame, because we had so many bags of sweets.”

“Yeah, that was quite embarrassing,” Shaw agrees. “Lots of things that I didn’t realize were, maybe, unusual at the time—I just stood in the middle of the room, and I was using a mic that just had this big, fuzzy foam cover on it, which Kristian handed me. We recorded everything all at the same time, there was no isolated vocals or anything like that. It was just like a rehearsal—which I didn’t think was weird, because I’d never recorded anything. I suppose it isn’t weird.” When Dry Cleaning would later migrate to Rockfield Studios in Wales to make New Long Leg and Stumpwork, Shaw came to the conclusion that it’s not so normal to hold the microphone with your hand while you’re recording a singing take. “Kristian is like a real artist,” she continues. “He really carefully considers everything and set up the room really carefully but, in many ways, it was very casual.”

Sweet Princess was immediately interesting, as the record opens with Shaw collaging YouTube comments together for the verses on “Goodnight” and, throughout the other four songs, she sings about Instagram porn accounts, a couple named Jimmy and Olga, going through a breakup on the day of Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry and, above all, monotonous British life told through newsstand headlines. This was Dry Cleaning’s first act, captured in guitar moves not unlike the Raincoats and Swell Maps. It was their first time in a studio; it was Shaw’s first time in a band, period.

Five, six months later, the band returned to the studio in the autumn of 2018 to make Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and upgraded from just a one-day marathon of recording to a weekend spent tracking six songs. “We still probably had less [time in the studio] than most bands would normally spend on, like, maybe even a single,” Maynard says. “I think we did a half-day of recording and then, on the second day, a few overdubs.” On the first day of recording, Dry Cleaning couldn’t even make any noise—because the cosmic jazz band The Comet is Coming was rehearsing next door.

But, the band had put some gigs at the Shacklewell Arms in London and Lancaster Castle under their belt in 2018 and 2019 and, despite having just five songs out, were able to bring some slight tricks into the studio with them. “I took sweets and I had water, got a tiny bit more professional,” she says, laughing. “Kristian said ‘Oh, it’s good to take sips of water in-between doing vocals, so that you don’t get “mouth sounds” in the recording.’ And I was like, okay. I picked up a few little things about how to record in the bit in-between. I remember taking it quite seriously.” Non-sequiturs and banal observations exist aplenty on Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, as Dry Cleaning converges together on songs about duvet covers, sausage rolls, Nintendo 64 graphics and heart disease. “You’re nothing but a fragrance to me now,” Shaw proposes on “Sit Down Meal.” When she gets a hold of a language you haven’t, good luck weaponizing life’s minutiae better than her.

Sweet Princess was initially printed on cassette upon its release, but the only time Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks ever existed physically was on joint the vinyl record Dry Cleaning put out with one EP on Side A and the other on Side B. When it was pressed, the record sold out quickly and the band was left with no physical music to peddle at gigs and the LP became highly collectible. “We definitely sold a few extra copies because people saw either side of it and thought it was two different records,” Maynard says. “Someone would say ‘Can I get one of each of these?’ and we’d be like, ‘Yes!’”

It’s rare to see an artist put such intentionality behind a reissue that’s occurring so few years after the project’s initial release. Most bands have to wait 10, 20 years before a record of theirs gets repressed in such a deliberate, cycled manner—or, if an album does go back to the printer, it’s usually a matter of one or two social media posts and a link-in-bio moment. But for Dry Cleaning, this facsimile of their first year as a band is equal parts a reclamation, a celebration and an introduction. “We definitely think of [Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess] as our first album, even though it’s two EPs,” Shaw says.

“We’ve tried to put some of the songs from those EPs into the set while touring the past two albums, and people don’t seem to know the songs as well as we kind of hoped,” Maynard admits. “That’s another part of it, as well, to give those songs a bit of a push and a service they never got. It’s quite strange when you’re touring albums, as well, because you’re going to a lot of places for the first time—but you’re servicing a certain record. Now, we’ve almost got three albums-worth of material, so you don’t get to play a lot of older stuff, sometimes—so that’s quite nice.”

Artist Lucy Vann, who made the original video for “Magic of Meghan,” was asked to return and make visualizers for all 11 songs—and her approach to aesthetics, according to Maynard, mirrors how the band sketches the songs they write. “We record on a phone, and it’s more about just listening to what’s happening and capturing moments of us jamming,” he says. “She makes things in a very lo-fi way,” Shaw adds. “Most things are shot on a phone and most things are shot incidentally, not really set up and, I think, largely unplanned. But she’s just a really sharp observer, and I think she’s a very tender person, as well. She’s very funny, very dry. She’s a kind person, and I think that comes across in the things that she notices. Often, it’s a lonely object or a glitch in something that makes you laugh. They’re low-stakes, and I find that we all really enjoy that kind of aesthetic—where it’s not super heavy, it’s tender and funny and observational.”

On their upcoming tour, which kicks off on March 10th at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, Dry Cleaning will be performing Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks in full. While “Viking Hair” and “Magic of Meghan” have been a part of the nightly setlists since they were written, a few of the 11 songs have never made it past the album recording before—especially “Sombre One.” Likewise, they’ve played “Jam After School” once or twice, but in a completely different form than how it first arrived five years ago. “We played it and it had all of these gaps and silent, spoken-word bits,” Shaw says. “We’ve never played how it actually sounds on the record. That one, we’ve been enjoying playing loads—because I think we all kind of forgot about it. And, it’s really fun to play, which has been a nice surprise.”

A moment that spurred Dry Cleaning to reissue Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess came when they were at Amoeba Records in San Francisco doing a “What’s In My Bag?” segment in late 2022 and discovered a copy of the record for sale with a $400 price tag. “Not that we wanted to burst that bubble, but it just became really apparent to us—over the years—how much people really wanted a copy of those EPs on vinyl,” Shaw says, chuckling. Though the record is no longer listed on Amoeba’s website, you can still get an original pressing for about $230 on Discogs—but it remains to be seen how the repressing affects that market value.

Instead of playing 1,000-cap venues like the Neptune or the Crystal Ballroom on this itinerary, Dry Cleaning plans to decamp to the Roxy and the Empty Bottle—both sub-500-cap spots—and perform some of the most intimate shows of their career thus far, a period the band experienced briefly—and fleetingly—before lockdown. Once they came out of quarantine with the critically acclaimed New Long Leg, lower-tier city venues were a thing of the past and they’d have added members on stage, maybe a lighting engineer rolling with them from spot-to-spot. “It’s going to be more stripped back, kind of like how the band started,” Maynard says. “We feel like we’ve taken every opportunity, when it’s been there, to step up—[whether it’s] taking more time to record or playing in a bigger venue. It’s quite nice to go back to where we wrote [Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks] for, or where we were at the time, performing in those kinds of spaces.”

“We didn’t play small venues for very long,” Shaw adds. “And that was especially apparent to me, because I hadn’t been in a band before. We were playing in small rooms and really enjoying it and, then, quite soon it got a lot bigger. Everything just got bigger, and that was great. It has its own excitement about it. But I do miss the intimacy of a small show—even just something down to the fact that everyone in the room can see you really well. It’s really nice. My performance style can be quite understated. I put a lot into it, but it’s very concentrated and it’s not necessarily a stadium style of performing or a style of performing that works really well in a huge, huge room. I’m really gonna savor it, being able to make eye-contact with everyone. It’ll be nice.”

A big piece of the puzzle for this reissue cycle is that Dry Cleaning will be going back in time to the spring of 2020 and giving Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess the full lifespan it was supposed to have four years ago—which means they’ll hit the Empty Bottle in Chicago, the Roxy in Los Angeles, the Independent in San Francisco and the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, landmark locale for any up-and-coming artist with an impetus that’s exciting to critics, listeners and the band itself. But the core celebration will occur during Dry Cleaning’s four-day stint at SXSW in two weeks. “I’m looking forward to the shows at SXSW, because a lot of the sets we used to do used to be about a half-hour long and, at SXSW, they’re going to be a lot of half-hour sets—which we rarely get to do anymore,” Maynard says. “Maybe you do a small gig in a shop, or something, but we rarely get to play for a half-hour. It’s quite strange to do it.”

Right in the middle of touring the EPs, the band was in Los Angeles and about to take on the Austin festival for the first time. But then, COVID-19 hit the states and the country went into a nationwide lockdown. You know the story. But having such a consequential, potentially career-changing slate of gigs thrown in the can would have demobilized a lot of bands’ momentum. But Dry Cleaning were set to arrive in Austin already signed to a label, having inked a roster spot with 4AD at the end of 2019. “There were definitely a lot of bands who’d crowd-funded going to SXSW, or they were hoping to sign deals at SXSW,” Shaw explains. “We were strangely quite secure by that point. Yeah, we were very, very lucky.”

“Even though a lot of shows got cancelled for us on that tour, we did New York shows [at Union Pool and Saint Vitus Bar]—so that alone was exciting enough. We’d done KEXP [in Seattle], as well,” Maynard adds. “We saw that as a win and, then, it was only a few months later that we started to hear that people were still thinking about us—because we’d done a lot of shows that people had been to in New York and in London, with a lot of friends and journalists [in attendance]. I wouldn’t say it worked in our favor but, yeah, it wasn’t awful. We felt quite fortunate.”

Despite having Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks online, Dry Cleaning still didn’t have an industry-labeled “full-length album” out yet by the time COVID-19 hit. But, even as the four-piece was surging as one of the most talked-about up-and-coming bands in England, all of it rightfully—and unsurprisingly—paled in comparison to the calamity outside. “It was bizarre,” Shaw says. “I think we were all just a bit hysterical. I don’t remember being worried; I remember laughing a lot—worried laughter, more than anything else, just because it was so absurd. It was also really raining hard in Los Angeles.”

“It felt like the end of the world, didn’t it?” Maynard chimes in. “Yeah, and there was a lot of panic-buying at supermarkets,” Shaw continues. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember thinking very much about the band, because it was such a massive global event that was potentially just so catastrophic. I wasn’t really thinking ‘Oh, no, what about our band?’ I was way more worried about the world. It felt so scary, and I was worried about my parents. I think it took longer to reflect on ‘Oh, right, yeah, we kind of had some momentum there. Can we keep it going?’”

Eventually, Dry Cleaning did keep going—as they’d start playing a portion of New Long Leg live, like “Scratchcard Lanyard” and “Strong Feelings”—and writing what would become the genius muscle of Stumpwork. Because of lockdown, they weren’t writing in cold, terrible-sounding rooms anymore. Instead, they were putting pen to paper at home, surrounded by flatmates and neighbors and being forced to quiet their own chaos into a bit of refined, restrained hushedness. “It wasn’t possible to make as much noise as usual,” Shaw says. “That lent an air of intimacy to some of the writing, in terms of playing softer and things being a bit more close. Playing music was really different.” “It definitely introduced the drum machine, because Nick couldn’t play drums at home,” Maynard adds.

Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks have so profoundly influenced where Dry Cleaning are now as a band. On Stumpwork, they ditched the sardonic post-punk and Shaw’s singing took on new pastiches of Dadaism, snarling meditations varnished with noise and sublime, muted vibrancy. The guitars were muggier, the instrumentation more hypnagogic and Shaw’s talk-rock stardust found a new glow when pressed against a backdrop of blissful bass hooks and bursting, distorted acmes. Upon returning to songs like “Phone Scam” and “Sit Down Meal” for the first time in a minute, Shaw has a better understanding of how those 11 tracks were, in some ways, prototypes for the certain styles of writing she’s adopted since. The bareness of something like “Traditional Fish” arrives devoid of meaning because Dry Cleaning could make it so back then, when they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, as Shaw aimed to test the limits of her own experimentation by tying a track together without giving too much of herself away by doing so.

“I find I have all kinds of feelings about them. Sometimes, I can’t stop thinking about what I would change and, sometimes, I’m pleasantly surprised by the writing,” she says. “It will make me laugh, because I haven’t considered it or read it in such a long time—and, sometimes, it gives a little insight into who we were as people when we wrote the songs. Particularly with the lyrics, I remember what was happening in my life at the time and have a bit of empathy for that person—maybe because, really, I was quite sad when I wrote a lot of those lyrics. It was a bit of a crossroads in my life. I think that, in terms of my writing on the songs, it is someone trying to figure out how to write lyrics. That’s very easy to see now, which I couldn’t really see before.”

After putting out two albums in less than two years (an two EPs, as well), Dry Cleaning taking this pause and placing such a deep, rewarding focus on the 11 songs that were, really, the genesis of the band completely—rather than do what they did after New Long Leg and write Stumpwork immediately—has given the quartet a new sense of purpose. “I feel looser than I would have done if we’d just gone straight into writing something new—because it does feel easy to see how far we’ve come, playing these songs,” Shaw says. “A lot has happened in a short space of time, and I think we’ve all evolved so much—in a really good way—so I feel confident.”

“[Going backwards] reminds you to be playful and to not over-analyze or overthink,” Maynard adds. “If we knew what was going to happen to those [EPs] when we recorded them, we would have reacted very differently to the situation. I feel like we tried to do that when we were recording [Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess]: Just don’t think about it, try and enjoy it and try to do it with the purpose I hope we always hold, which is just trying to entertain each other and trying to impress each other and trying to make music that the four of us like.”

For the first time since lockdown, Dry Cleaning have had time to relax and consider what happened when their tour got canceled and when their backs were up against the wall. Like their peers and the rest of us, there was a lot of fear—not just for the future of the world but the future of our families and neighbors and strangers whose names we, maybe, didn’t know then and still don’t know now but have loved all the same. They say hindsight is 20/20 and, after revisiting Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks again for the first time since before Dry Cleaning was a band playing “Scratchcard Lanyard” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon or booking massive festival slots or winning a Grammy Award, I’m buying more into the phrase than ever. It’s like Shaw sings on the Stumpwork track “Icebergs”: “For a happy and exciting life—locally, nationwide or worldwide—stay interested in the world around you. Keep the curiosity of a child if you can.”

But Dry Cleaning has never been much interested in getting wrapped up in the uncertainty of it all—even if Questlove is sitting 10 feet away from you and, as Maynard puts it, he would have “shit myself in so many different ways” if he let himself think about it afterwards for even a second. Now, perspectives have widened and the disasters of the planet are no less quiet than they were four years ago, but Dry Cleaning believes it’s time to not write something new, but to retrace their steps and give some shading to the color of their oddball first-born. And who needs a new record when you’ve got loose ends? “People are always like ‘Oh, you need to be in the moment and enjoy it.’ Do you?” Shaw questions. “Sometimes, being in the moment is fucking terrifying.”

The reissue of Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks is out on March 8th via 4AD. Pre-order here.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.