Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
Critic Score
Based on 34 reviews
2021 Ratings: #51 / 753
Year End Rank: #7
User Score
Based on 985 ratings
2021 Rank: #487
Liked by 130 people
April 2, 2021 / Release Date
LP / Format
4AD / Label
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
The Observer

The everyday becomes poetic on this intensely original album of post-punk shape-shifting from the south London foursome.

100
The Arts Desk

What I love about New Long Leg is its insistence to look for the finer detail in all that we could miss out on, and to see that there is magic everywhere – even in the most ordinary places.

90
musicOMH
Displacing the emotional in favour of engagingly tenuous perspectives, this precariously magnetic album, much like the contents of Dourofs, will absolutely floor you.
90
Exclaim!

New Long Leg may not always be positive, but it's more interesting than that, more needling and necessary. It's everything at once, a record that absorbs and spits back the unending noise of the world and asks that you take a second look, every common thing somehow made brand new.

90
Spill Magazine
This is a bit of a know-it-when-you-hear-it band that comes along once in a while, whose uniqueness is felt immediately, and the best part is that they manage to keep it up the whole way through. A truly stellar debut.
90
Gigwise
Dry Cleaning have really nailed the delicate balance of music v.s lyrics: the band themselves are really well put together, playing dancey, groovy indie pop that gives you flashbacks to prime Blur. The addition of Florence Shaw’s beatnik-esque spoken word lyrics and delivery really takes this project to the next level.
90
No Ripcord

A sonic cigarette hanging off the bottom lip.

90
RIOT

Dry Cleaning’s debut album New Long Leg is a masterful and unpretentious ode to the mundane.

86
Pitchfork
The London art-rockers’ outstanding debut is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. The cumulative effect of Florence Shaw’s narration is inexplicably wonderful.
83
Beats Per Minute

Dry Cleaning seem a working-class band, but they are not a political band in that same sense. This concept is mimicked across many post-punk bands past and present, but instead of trying to stay firmly between those politically-charged guardrails they have stepped outside of them and created their own scenic route.

82
Paste
Some grin in the face of the absurd and rotten, and others reflect all the hot air back outward. Dry Cleaning make an art of doing both.
80
Record Collector
Fresh, clever and endlessly intriguing, it adds up to a stellar debut.
80
The Irish Times

Dry Cleaning bring a refreshing pop sensibility to British rock music, and New Long Leg is a cracking and captivating debut.

80
FLOOD Magazine

The group has been buzzing for a while, and as is too rarely the case, New Long Leg lives up to the hype and builds upon it, imagining a future in which a new crop of bands long to mimic their style.

80
Dork

A record that exists in the gaps of modern life that most other bands skip over, ‘New Long Leg’ sticks its head in your kitchen cupboards, worries about Brexit, waits for the bins to get collected, feels paranoid, gets its leg pissed on in the big Sainsbury’s. Modern life is delightful!

80
Mojo

Cerebral, caustic: exhilarating John Parish-produced debut from art-schooled Londoners.

80
The Telegraph
The arty Brighton quartet’s debut album is an engrossingly energetic fusion of the mundane, the surreal and the downright bizarre.
80
Northern Transmissions
Across ten tracks Dry Cleaning’s debut offers an almost bottomless pit of wordy treasures to salvage and like any challenges you’re encouraged to burrow deeper to gain a great understanding.
80
God Is in the TV

The end result is so unique and detached from current trends that anyone who fails to listen to Dry Cleaning is missing out on something they won’t be getting anywhere else in their musical diet.

80
Uncut

А smart foursome me with a working try knowledge of Life Without Buildings and late-period Magazine, Dry Cleaning enlisted John Parish to add extra damp-kitchen murk to their pleasingly grubby debut LP.

80
The Guardian
Florence Shaw’s laconic spoken delivery is a highlight in a talented band making the quotidian exciting.
80
Clash

As a complete aesthetic statement, the debut album from Dry Cleaning hardly merits contemporaries at all – suffocating, surreal, and exploratory, it takes chances other groups could scarcely envisage.

80
The Skinny

Like Shaw’s one-liners, and the mundane moments they represent, the songs on New Long Leg become heavy and improbably moving when stacked on top of each other.

80
The Line of Best Fit
In the past decade or so, countless bands have been brought up from the same well of tightly-wound, expressionistic rock, but none hold the same uniquely fascinating appeal that Dry Cleaning have. Play New Long Leg loud, and play it often.
80
DIY

There’s a charming purity that runs through ‘New Long Leg’, and a sense that Dry Cleaning wasn’t the product of a masterplan.

80
Under the Radar

New Long Leg delivers on every level, from Shaw’s lyrical attention to detail to the impeccable musicianship that surrounds her. Fulfilling all the promise shown by those early releases not to mention 4AD’s faith in signing them up, Dry Cleaning are the real deal. Potential realized in abundance.

80
NME

Following their two hype-building EPs ‘Sweet Princess’ and ‘Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks’, the quartet’s debut album sees them wade further into lyrical surrealism and musical experimentation.

80
AllMusic

They know exactly what they're doing, and the risks they take result in a debut album that brings a fresh energy to post-punk that's equally challenging and rewarding.

78
Still Listening
Shaw tends to get most of the plaudits for her lyrical style, with her narratives likened to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but the relationship between the guitar and bass really helps them to stand out from other bands with the same spoken-word aesthetic.
73
Spectrum Culture
Rarely does a freshman project have such a solid identity and personality. And Dry Cleaning are able to diversify their sound just enough to last an engaging 41 minutes.
70
Crack Magazine

On debut album New Long Leg, the south London quartet further exploit that tension by broadening their palette, experimenting with an array of guitar textures, as well as thrillingly tinny drum machines and pointillist basslines, placed prominently in the mix.

70
Loud and Quiet

The album that emerged is a record of greater confidence and refinement than Dry Cleaning’s two EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks. Here, triviality and meaning compete to create a compelling portrait of ordinary life, one littered with acerbic wit, intricacy and yawning negative space.

70
American Songwriter

Whether this seems like something that tickles your sweet spot or you would rather stick with music more predictable, there is no doubt it sounds like nothing else.

70
The Forty-Five
Modern-day absurdities and wry truths show up on the debut album from the London post-punk band, delivered with languid panache.
Nightwing734
NR

The instrumentals are nice I guess?

JohnLouisHoward
100

DRY CLEANING

A Kerry Bog Pony.
Do everything and feel nothing.
Nick Buxton’s drums.
An Oslo bouncy ball.
Working class roots vs. middle class roots.
Tom Dowse’s guitar.
Aldous Harding’s even more eccentric cousin.
Just an emo dead stuff collector, things come to the brain.
Lewis Maynard’s bass.
Authentic vs. post-authentic. Most listeners have lost the ability to tell the difference.
Aldous Harding’s producer, John Parish.
Listeners have lost the ability to tell ... read more

Doofy
46

Did Baxter Dury and Kim Gordon have a daughter together?

Sadly Florence Shaw's low energy vocals lack character or soundbite appeal - really feels like you're sitting bored at a beat poetry performance so put some Sonic Youth/The Fall instrumentals on your headphones to try and drown out the endless monologues.

The connection between these vocals and the music supporting them feels loose at best - and I don’t ever get the feeling I'm listening to one of the great wordsmiths of our age ... read more

65

their lyrics are weird in a way that mostly fails. Bits still slap tho.

AP__Music
70

A week with Dry Cleaning. It’s a fitting name for the band with their analogies of the repetitive nature of mundane normal life assessments that are offered throughout ‘New Long Leg’ – Yabba! The album is packed with quotable lines involving a dentist with a messy garden, patting Dad on the head, Yabba, No you are, and the worst task of all – cleaning the fat out of the grill pan. I have started this album many times and gone ‘it’s not for me’, ... read more

bigfolding
77

68 > 77

Whilst the execution isn't perfect, I think Dry Cleaning fell on a really cool formula here. The observable impact this has had on UK Post-Punk in recent years has only reinforced this belief. There are moments where it really works, but the homogeneous sound of the album as a whole stops me raising the score too much

Best: Scratchcard Lanyard, Unsmart Lady, More Big Birds

Worst: Her Hippo

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Track List

1Scratchcard Lanyard
4:06
89
2Unsmart Lady
3:02
80
3Strong Feelings
4:04
82
4Leafy
3:08
80
5Her Hippo
4:38
84
6New Long Leg
4:12
80
7John Wick
3:26
76
8More Big Birds
4:07
78
9A.L.C
3:09
74
10Every Day Carry
7:38
79
Total Length: 41 minutes
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Added on: February 9, 2021