Dry Cleaning‘s Sydney Opera House debut arrived just in time for Vivid LIVE, a long-awaited local first for the South London four-piece. And it was a good night to finally show up.
Before any of that though, the theatre was well packed in preparation for the opening band, Station Model Violence.
The band formed around Daniel Stewart (known as DX, of Total Control and The UV Race) after his move to NSW following Melbourne’s extended lockdowns, with Buz Clatworthy of R.M.F.C. at the core alongside members drawn from KX Aminal and connected projects. Their debut album is dense, motorik pulse against serrated guitar lines, with vocal pressure and as enjoyable to watch as Melbourne’s Gut Health and with a frontman as enigmatic as Viagra Boys Sebastion Murphy. I love seeing a packed stage, full of people and instruments and most of all, I love catching a room drowning in Kosmische Musik inspired punk.
Live, they were unhurried and loud in the right ways. This was their second appearance at Vivid LIVE following a blistering set in 2025, and the Joan Sutherland felt like the next best venue to catch them outside of headlining a dim, squishy, pub show.
‘Secret Love’, Dry Cleaning’s third album and released just a few months ago, moves through early ’80s US punk, stoner rock, and no-wave, planting the band more firmly in the rock avant-garde than anything they’ve done before. Florence Shaw’s spoken-word delivery increasingly mixes in sung vocals, and Friday night leaned right into that tension between the two modes.
Shaw is a hypnotic presence on a stage, still, watchful, delivering lyrics about mundane-to-surreal domestic observations as though she’s reading aloud to herself. Guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton drive the melodic momentum underneath all that deadpan surface. They opened with ‘Sliced by a Fingernail’, their brand new standalone single, a meditation on hating attention and fantasising about hiding inside a flower bud – alongside ‘Blood’ from ‘Secret Love’, and the crowd-pleasing ‘Gary Ashby’ from 2022’s ‘Stumpwork’.
Dry Cleaning continue their Australian run tonight at Melbourne’s RISING festival at the Forum, then Perth, Ballarat, and Hobart before wrapping in New Zealand at Wellington’s Meow Nui and Auckland’s Hollywood Avondale.
