Dry Cleaning seeped quickly onto the scene, debuting with two of the best EPs from 2019 and one of the best albums of 2021 with New Long Leg. The fact that they were so quick to rush out a second album was concerning. Was it a rush job, or a lighter album helmed on tour stops? Neither, in fact, the seeds of Stumpwork were written before New Long Leg was even finished, which cements that not only are the band prodigious writers but that when the band is given more time to hone their songs, as they do here, the results are that much stronger.
While the previous albums played within a very specific, talk-sing, post-punk wheelhouse, Dry Cleaning’s newest blows any projected constraints away. Florence Shaw is still iconoclastically unique in her vocal style and presence, but it never feels like a gimmick, instead it sounds like she is beholden to the tracks, wrestling with the lyrics and the anxiety of the complex guitar and instrumental work, with the finished product as emotive as someone belting a high note.
Stumpwork is bright and more exploratory than what came before, the result of a band pushing the boundaries of its sound farther than just about any of their peers without losing track of their trademark lockstep groove. That groove is what drives each song, as it did on the band’s previous work, with much of Shaw’s stream of conscious lyrics originating in real-time during recording. Even if the basis for how the band works together is the same though, their desire to push farther than they have before is what remains most notable.
Dry Cleaning was never depressing or dark per se, but Stumpwork revels in optimism; an understanding that the group has found an audience and that despite the deaths of some of the band’s family members between albums, their work was important enough to perceive. There is grief, but Dry Cleaning has developed a maturity to the grief, one of the well-made songs and well-lived lives.
