Watch: Dry Cleaning – ‘Cruise Ship Designer’

Dry Cleaning share ‘Cruise Ship Designer’, the second single from their new album Secret Love, out 9 January 2026. The new track follows lead single ‘Hit My Head All Day’ and arrives alongside a music video featuring the band’s Lewis Maynard performing a dance routine choreographed for the track by BULLYACHE. ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ is a classic Dry Cleaning pop song sung from the perspective of a nautical entrepreneur who has deluded himself that his work serves society, its perky careerism also channelling some of XTC’s ‘Making Plans for Nigel’.

Vocalist and lyrcists Florence Shaw elaborates, “The song is about a cruise ship and hotel designer who’s skilled and paid well, but who doesn’t believe his role has real worth. He tries to enjoy it, and invests himself in meeting the challenges of the job.”

Secret Love is the finest expression yet of the profound friendships that created Dry Cleaning, between frontperson Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard. Here, the south London four-piece take their place in rock’s avant garde, catalysing the Reaganite paranoia of early 80s US punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave and pastoral fingerpicking, while Florence’s delivery, meticulously calibrated to her bandmates’ soundscapes, asserts her in a lineage of spoken-word artists stretching from Laurie Anderson to Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins.

The follow-up to 2021’s New Long Leg and 2022’s Stumpwork started life in Peckham rehearsal spaces, all four members writing, playing and responding to each other in the room: in Dry Cleaning, music and lyrics form an inseparable, generative whole. Secret Love evolved through affirming sessions at Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio The Loft and explosive ones with Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox at Sonic Studios in Dublin, taking advantage of the sensory particulars of each space, and finally with Cate Le Bon at Black Box in the Loire Valley. After interviewing various potential producers, they picked Cate – an esteemed solo artist who has also made albums for Deerhunter, Devendra Banhart, Wilco and Horsegirl – for her unabashed positivity and openness. “Being in a room with them and hearing that vitality and life force that exists between them all, it’s such a unique expression,” she says.

Stream / download ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ here.
Pre-order / pre-save Secret Love here.