Florence Shaw is lost for words when told that Taylor Swift has just shot a video at her local shopping centre. “Oh my God – the Whitgift Centre,” the gobsmacked singer finally sputters. “I used to hang out there as a miserable teenager. That is so shocking to me.”
Shocking but with an element of deja vu. In the video for Opalite, Swift descends on the 1970s mall in Croydon, in south London, and clowns around with Domhnall Gleeson and Graham Norton.
Hastily firing up the clip on YouTube, Shaw, who belongs to the indie band Dry Cleaning, is struck by its similarity to a video that another singer made at the Omni Shopping Centre, in Santry, north Dublin, last year.
“She’s copying CMAT, isn’t she? Do you remember with Euro-Country?” Shaw jokes. “She’s copying her. She’s, like, ‘I’ll get Graham Norton in … I’ll go down the shopping centre.’ Outrageous. Intellectual property theft!”
READ MORE
Dancing in shopping centres is a long way from where you’ll find Dry Cleaning. They’re a brilliantly artsy band who perform complicated postpunk while Shaw delivers fantastically droll spoken-word lyrics that live somewhere between James Joyce, Ian Dury and a mumbled voicenote from your pal who can’t quite recall what she got up to last night but is sure it isn’t good.
If that blend of jagged indie and stream-of-consciousness wordplay sounds abstruse in theory, in practice it’s both irresistible and hugely successful. They’ve already won a Grammy and are tipped for a place on the 2026 Mercury Prize shortlist for their third LP, Secret Love. In April they’re playing their largest Irish show so far, at Vicar Street in Dublin.
Secret Love expands Dry Cleaning’s musical influences beyond 1980s and 1990s indie to embrace a more abrasive and cathartic sound. As part of their mission to switch things up, they tapped the Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon as producer – which meant that, for the first time in her music career, Shaw was in the recording suite with another woman.
That was quite a shift. The music industry is still hugely male-dominated, both on stage and, especially, off it. Shaw is often the only woman in the studio. Everyone else – her bandmates, the engineers, the person who makes the tea – are typically all men. Having Le Bon on board changed the dynamic in ways that, while ultimately positive, initially took some getting used to.
“Sometimes I feel when you’re a woman in the music industry, when another woman comes along it’s a bit of a shock. You’re so used to the dynamic of being the only woman ... I’m always weird with change of any kind. So for a while I had to get used to it, had to be, like, ‘Oh my God. Okay …’ Not in the sense of feeling threatened or anything. You realise what you’ve been missing in a way. To be around men a lot of the time, you do have to slightly change yourself or adapt.”
When Dry Cleaning started, Shaw and her bandmates all had day jobs – Shaw lectured in art – and they remain pleasantly surprised by their success. They were especially astonished when the artwork for their second album, Stumpwork, won a Grammy in 2024 for best recording package.
That was all the more surprising given its provocative character: the record sleeve is a picture of soap covered in pubic hair. A few people on the internet were bothered. Dry Cleaning are proud of the shot, though, and never regarded it as controversial.
“There was no discussion about it being shocking in any way. I don’t remember the label saying anything about it,” Shaw says. “We certainly didn’t. We obviously acknowledged what the photo was of, but I don’t think we thought, ‘What will the public think of this?’ We thought, ‘This is such a perfect cover.’”
Dry Cleaning are one of those great bands whose success feels like a small but important pushback against the deluge of mediocrity in modern music. They were formed in 2017 by the veteran indie musicians Tom Dowse (guitar), Nick Buxton (drums) and Lewis Maynard (bass). But the magic ingredient was Shaw, a visual artist and writer who, before Dry Cleaning, had never performed in public.
She wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to become a pop star. An introvert who doesn’t mind her own company, she initially rebuffed the offer to sign up to what would become Dry Cleaning. But Dowse, who knew Shaw from the Royal College of Art in London, persisted. Shaw had just been through a break-up and fancied doing something different. Why not join a band?
The fledgling Dry Cleaning were soon writing what would become their acclaimed debut album, New Long Leg, from 2021.
Five years later they’ve gone from strength to strength. They have also concluded that the best way to evolve is to try new things – hence the decision to record some of Secret Love in Dublin, where they worked with Daniel Fox and Alan Duggan of the eardrum-bothering art-rockers Gilla Band – the best band in Ireland and, with their emphasis on volume and catharsis, one of the most boundary-breaking indie acts anywhere at the moment.
[ Ten great Irish music acts to catch in 2026Opens in new window ]
“We’re all such big Gilla Band fans and fans of Daniel and Alan’s work,” Maynard says. “We’ve had multiple times watching Gilla Band live in awe. When I was watching them I wasn’t reacting. My face was stuck. I wasn’t even clapping. It was, like, ‘This is unbelievable.’
“We’ve been wanting to work together for a while. We gave them some of the trickier songs that we’d been stuck with. We thought they would be interesting people to take them to. And they were great with it.”
Shaw’s lyrics are a source of enduring fascination and conjecture among fans.
What does she mean by “Life, a series of memorials and signals telling us this or that,” which is the first line on Secret Love?
How to interpret the band’s new song Cruise Ship Designer, seemingly about a man who is happily selling his soul for an existence of office drudgery but comes across as genuinely contented? Is Shaw railing against life as a corporate drone or suggesting that all that truly matters is finding fulfilment, no matter what form it takes?
“A lot of my writing early on … there were lots of found bits and bobs, YouTube comments and stuff,” she says. “There were also lots of things I wrote to sound like something overheard, rather than something actually overheard.
“It was an affectation in a way, what I was going for, that style. Lots and lots of voices. Maybe now there are fewer voices in the songs. Maybe something like that has changed. But why? I don’t necessarily think it’s better to have fewer voices. Maybe there was less going on while we were writing. Maybe my mind was a bit less fractious.”
While serious about music, Dry Cleaning are relaxed about everything else. They joke that the next time they’re in Los Angeles they’re going to find some fake plastic Grammys. (They didn’t receive any actual statuettes for Stumpwork; that honour went to their design team.) They did something similar on their last trip to Japan, where Maynard was fascinated by the fake plastic food with which restaurants try to tempt customers.
“There’s a street in Tokyo where all the plastic foods are made. But they’re expensive, so a lot of the restaurants have to rent them. I went to buy something but couldn’t afford anything. There was one thing in my price range,” he says, reaching for something off camera. “A plastic cold beer!” he explains, clasping his synthetic memento with very real delight.
That isn’t the only unusual trophy Dry Cleaning have picked up on their travels. At the All Together Now festival in Waterford last year, Shaw was delighted to receive a plush tortoise from a fan, in a reference to the song Gary Ashby, which is about the singer’s pet reptile. Shaw still has the furry keepsake, which she hopes to reunite with its owner in Dublin.
“I’m going to bring it back. Because I kind of said, ‘Can I keep it?’ and I could tell he was a bit, like [adopts dubious voice], ‘Oh yeah?’ He wasn’t that sure. But I’m bringing it. It’s coming back.”
She waves the tortoise enthusiastically down the camera. “I’m going to return it somehow.”
Secret Love is released by 4AD. Dry Cleaning play Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday, April 17th
