The hugely influential South London post-punks Dry Cleaning have announced their upcoming second album Stumpwork, which follows their excellent 2021 debut LP New Long Leg. Furthermore, us lot are lucky enough to get a single ahead of its release which is titled “Don’t Press Me” which is paired with a tactile hand-drawn animated video no less.
The new track sees the band deploy their distinctive nasal guitar tones and the dampened verbose lyricism that fans have come to love. With a style that is growing exceedingly popular among young up-and-comers, Dry Cleaning (for my money) are some of the best to do it. Discussing the chorus of the latest hit, vocalist Florence Shaw explained; “The words in the chorus came about because I was trying to write a song to sing to my own brain: ‘You are always fighting me / You are always stressing me out…'”. With a video created by Peter Millard, the song is typically short and sweet (as is customary with Dry Cleaning’s practice) but packs in a more optimistic aura from the haunting disparity in their former tracks. Have a listen to “Don’t Press Me” down below:
The forthcoming album is produced by John Parish (who has worked with such illustrious names as Aldous Harding, Parquet Courts, The Goon Sax etc.) and will arrive on October the 21st 2022 via 4AD. You can find the official track listing from the new record beneath:
01 Anna Calls From the Arctic
02 Kwenchy Kups
03 Gary Ashby
04 Driver’s Story
05 Hot Penny Day
06 Stumpwork
07 No Decent Shoes for Rain
08 Don’t Press Me
09 Conservative Hell
10 Liberty Log
11 Icebergs
The album’s artwork mirrors the mundanity in which the band revels, with that slight hint of absurdist tang the striking image was conceived of by a pair of multidisciplinary artists known as Rottingdean Bazaar and photographer Annie Collinge. Stumpwork is available to pre-order at the band’s official site.
The band will be playing at the Pitchfork Music Festival at Union Park in Chicago on the 16th of July 2022. In her own words, Shaw lifted the lid on the feelings a Dry Cleaning show might illicit; “Some people definitely find it uncomfortable to watch me, that’s something I’ve heard a lot of people say—to me, for some reason. It’s not a persona. My way of getting into it is just to concentrate very hard and to observe the room very carefully and to feel things that usually I am holding back.”
