Stumpwork

A record that, when given the requisite time and attention, offers unfathomable depths to explore.

Stumpwork is an essential album, and one of the very best of 2022.

Hearing Dry Cleaning's words and music travel in different ways to the same destination remains fascinating, and the ways they open up their music on Stumpwork with warmth, sensuality, and humor reveal their originality even more fully.

If the music and lyrics are both impressive, though, it's the interaction between them that makes Stumpwork such a triumph. They work together and against each other, pushing and pulling, fighting arrhythmically or slipping into step as the moment demands. [Nov 2022, p.38]

Dry Cleaning may not get mentioned in the same breath as other young London art-rock groups like black midi or Squid, but they should. Stumpwork proves that this band’s style has legs.

While New Long Leg basked in a chic trendiness, Stumpwork more soberly conjures the spectrum of 21st century life: our endless search for identity, our egoic highs and crashes, the ineluctable tedium.

One of Stumpwork’s greatest strengths is its tension between curiosity and apathy, opposing forces that clash throughout the album. Often, it feels like oblivion is winning.

Lyrically, Stumpwork triumphs over anything produced by their contemporaries, but that might have been to the detriment of the music, which bravely evades the instrumental vitality of their debut. But it is an album rooted in grief – specifically the grief that comes from losing a loved one – and with that knowledge, Stumpwork suddenly makes a lot more sense.

With Shaw’s vocals as the pivot, Dowse, Maynard and Buxton flex, weave and dance around her, resulting in a nuanced listen that extends the band way beyond their pigeonhole of “post-punk.” Hard to pinpoint where Dry Cleaning belong now, which can only be a good thing.

This sprawling, tender lucid dream of an album morphs into various shapes: angular and jagged, lush and distorted, Twin Peaks-esque surrealism, wistful and surrendering. Whether Shaw is proposing friendship or not, Stumpwork offers us more than enough.

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.

Dry Cleaning’s second album isn’t a radical departure from last year’s outstanding New Long Leg. Florence Shaw still has the laconic, deadpan delivery of someone idly chatting over a garden fence. However, everything is slightly more refined, melodious and focused.

It’s unlikely to win over the naysayers, but, for those already enamoured with their kitchen sink Dadaism, ‘Stumpwork’ is yet more magic from Dry Cleaning.

Shaw tries to sing here and there (notably on “Driver’s Story”) but Dry Cleaning’s words and music seem to work best together when they’re working independently of each other. The band’s peers in the sing-speak/post-punk group Wet Leg do a better job overall of conjuring joy from the marriage of poetry and music but what Dry Cleaning do feels unique.

Each instrument is put to use across multiple genres, experimenting with a collection of new sounds. The result is a moment of exciting expansion.

Vivid, touch-sensitive responses to a world unravelling. [Nov 2022, p.90]

Stumpwork isn’t easily decoded on the first listen. John Parish’s production work needs some getting used to, particularly in how he treats Shaw’s vocals with a certain tinny harshness even as he pushes them to the front of the mix. Even outside of that, Dry Cleaning are still playing 1980s-era indie and languors in obtuse sprechgesang. But also like New Long Leg, Stumpwork is worthy of inhabiting completely and capable of rewarding multiple listens.

Stumpwork demonstrates that the Dry Cleaning business is going from strength to strength.

Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.

To their credit, Dry Cleaning is not compromising their often prickly art. Rather, like the most resolute artists, with the provocative and relentless Stumpwork, they admirably move their boundaries further afield regardless of appealing to a bigger audience.