Patrolling the treacherous interzone between mundanity and profundity, DRY CLEANING unleash a second album that mixes Tories and tortoises, metal and ambient, comedy and catharsis. Looks like quitting the day jobs might pay off after all. “We’ve got a lot of friends who ask, ‘What happened, what’s the secret?’” they tell LAURA SNAPES.

WHEN DRY CLEANING STOP AT A HERTFORDSHIRE PUB EN ROUTE TO A festival one skin-blistering July Sunday, they seek shade in the beer garden’s darkest corner, where they tenderly pick flies off one another and enjoy a good heavy meal. Wearing factor 50 and shades of monochrome, the four-piece would be your archetypal goths in hot weather were they not immensely friendly and clearly charmed by the vicissitudes of new-band life. One day you’re playing a US talk show; then a family festival where you clock UK kids’ TV stars Dick & Dom by the tea urn.

This is the switchback of Dry Cleaning’s last 12 months – making up for lost time after their debut album, 2021’s New Long Leg, struck a chord amid pandemic restrictions. Vocalist Florence Shaw’s uncanny lyricism, delivering observations and found phrases in a meticulous mutter, unfolded like the conveyor belt of an increasingly alienated mind, while her bandmates offered contrasting catharsis. In guitarist Tom Dowse they have a compulsive explorer of the instrument’s outer reaches, his playing by turns louche, minimal-ist and prowling. “I geek out on guitar tone,” he tells MOJO, almost apologetically.

LAST SUMMER, WITH GIGS RESTRICTED, THE BAND STRUCK AHEAD WITH ALBUM two (“There was nothing else to do,” says drummer Nick Buxton). Like New Long Leg, Stumpwork was made at Rockfield in Wales with Polly Harvey collaborator John Parish. It’s a relationship that thrives on the producer’s blunt messaging. “If he doesn’t like something you’re doing, he’ll just say no,” says Dowse. “And we like that.” “I always feel really suspicious when people blow smoke up your arse,” adds Shaw, rearranging her waist-length hair like a scarf.