Dry Cleaning are releasing their third album Secret Love this Friday, but today they’ve dropped what feels like its emotional thesis statement: ‘Joy’, the fourth and final single, following ‘Hit My Head All Day’, ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ and ‘Let Me Grow and You’ll See The Fruit’.
‘Joy’ cuts in with spiky, layered guitar from our post-punk past, all sharp edges and nervous momentum. Floating above it is Florence Shaw’s famously nonchalant vocal. That friction — anxious guitar versus deadpan delivery — is where the song really lives, generating a low-level tension that never quite resolves.
Lyrically, the track was initially pieced together from adverts found in Virginia Tech University’s History of Food and Drink archive, but ‘Joy’ lands less as collage and more as a strangely sincere pep talk for bleak times. It closes Secret Love with a line that feels disarmingly earnest in 2025: “Don’t give up on being sweet.”
“Recently I’ve felt pessimistic about the world. The influence of what they call “the manosphere”, the genocide against Palestinians continuing despite huge protests, the rise of the racist Reform party in the UK, the promotion of AI in art and music. I wanted to try and stoke my drive to stay positive and spread softness and compassion. The wishes in the song have a naive quality.” – Florence Shaw
The BULLYACHE-choreographed visualiser starring guitarist Tom Dowse mirrors that same stripped-back sincerity. It’s cheap, simple and refreshingly unpolished — no narrative, no art-school fog — just Dowse dancing like he means it. The joy comes from the relish in the movement itself, turning awkwardness into something expressive, human and oddly moving.
Dowse from Dry Cleaning explains:
“We were looking to get away from the longer form, narrative and impressionistic confines of a typical music video and give ourselves, friends and fans a way to respond to the music in a more expressive way that feels personal.
We’ve seen the vastly different ways people behave at our shows – pogoing singalongs, full wig-outs, lone figures inhabiting the sound in their own private universe. With that in mind, we asked Bullyache to design a set of moves to each song on Secret Love as a starting point for ourselves and others to mimic or interpret them in a fun and idiosyncratic way, regardless of technical ability.”
In a cultural moment obsessed with optimisation, irony and machine-made everything, ‘Joy’ feels almost confrontational in its softness — a post-punk song that dares to suggest that staying kind is still a radical act.
Check out ‘Joy’ now. Secret Love is out this Friday, 9 January.
