In the video for “Scratchcard Lanyard,” Dry Cleaning vocalist Florence Shaw is a floating head in the world’s smallest dive bar. Her face takes up the whole stage, a perch from which she eyes the tiny puppet DJ and the tiny puppet bartender with mild disgust and confusion. She delivers a dry monologue in a wan, extremely British tone, subtly arching her eyebrows for emphasis. The whole affair carries an air of suspicion, with the slightest hint of deer in the headlights. The shot zooms out, and there’s the full band playing animatedly beside her; zoom in again, and it’s the Flo show. It’s a clever video, one that nods to the isolation of the pandemic, the media’s tendency to focus on the girl in the band, and of course, Shaw’s restrained performance style. “Do everything and feel nothing,” she intones, barely moving.
How does someone so static become the lead singer of a noisy rock band? The better question is, how do you deny the strange, funny charisma of someone like Florence Shaw? Just hearing her thoughts, expressed in the tone of a slightly sardonic narrator, was enough for her former art school friend Tom Dowse to suggest she join his new band back in 2017. Shaw, a visual artist more than a musician, was hesitant, but she was assured she could just talk instead of sing. Largely through the specificity of her affect and observations on the world, the band’s debut album arrives fully formed, ready to evacuate the contents of your brain and replace them with the odd images, bizarre obsessions, vivid sense memories, and banal judgements that live rent-free in the mind of another.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum of break-ups, a dentist with a messy back garden, a cab driver sucking on Pop Rocks, llama plushies in a shop, a big jar of mayonnaise in the back of the fridge, a critique of format changes to Antiques Roadshow, a Tokyo bouncy ball, an Oslo bouncy ball, a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball—these are all things you will encounter while navigating the world of New Long Leg. You could throw a competition for Shaw’s best non-sequiturs, food category (the winner: “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours,” from “Strong Feelings”). The cumulative effect of these lines is surreally welcoming, especially when interspersed with dramatically phrased maxims like, “Never talk about your ex, never never never never, never slag them off because then they know.”
Compared to Dry Cleaning’s scrappier EPs, 2019’s Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, the album’s production and mix are exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect. Helmed by John Parish, who’s produced everyone from PJ Harvey to Aldous Harding, New Long Leg is like a striking black and white photograph with the contrast turned up. Guitarist Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton have always worked as a strong foil to Shaw—moody riffs and sludgy bass on loop, the steady pulse and flash of chaos to her disarming apathy—but in this picture the vocalist now appears even sharper.