Music
27 Jul 21

Dry Cleaning share double A-side single, ‘Bug Eggs’ and ‘Tony Speaks!’

The new tracks were recorded in the same sessions as the band's acclaimed debut album 'New Long Leg'.

English post-punk band Dry Cleaning have released a new double A-side single, ‘Bug Eggs’/Tony Speaks!’, via 4AD.

Both tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in July and August 2020 during the sessions for the band’s debut LP New Long Leg, and were previously only available as bonus tracks.

“‘Bug Eggs’ is about the confidence that comes with age, fragility and sexual desire,” Florence Shaw said in a statement. “The lyrics to ‘Tony Speaks!’ were written days after the Conservative party won the December 2019 UK election. I was thinking about climate change, environmental catastrophes and political campaigning.”

Ambitious album New Long Leg - produced by John Parish - features Shaw’s spoken vocals tightly intertwined with the band’s restless instrumentals. Its lyrics are preoccupied by themes like dissociation, escapism, daydreaming, complicated feelings of love, anger, revenge, anxiety, the kitchen, lethargy, forgetfulness, and survival.

Shaw peppered the songs with a thousand tiny details, little witty asides about supermarkets, cupboards, beauty products and body parts adding up to sonic landscapes that teems with the strange magic of ordinary life. The South London group stepped up the captivating sound found on their 2019 EPs Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks – to present a project that’s more ambitious and compellingly original in both sonic direction and lyrical content.

"Amidst a movement of post-punk acts who tend to take themselves very, very seriously, Dry Cleaning take a leaf out of Girl Band’s book, by focusing intensely on the seemingly mundane – hot dogs, Antiques Roadshow, cleaning fat out of the grill pan – until it transforms and transcends into something else entirely," Lucy O'Toole wrote in her Hot Press review. "Shaw mines beautiful absurdity, and sometimes tragedy, out of these painfully ordinary items and occurrences – allowing New Long Leg to serve as a powerful exploration of dullness and ennui, without ever fully giving into those concepts itself."

The band will be on the road throughout 2021 and 2022 in the UK, US and Ireland.

Take a listen below: