Review: Dry Cleaning at The Naval Store
Dry Cleaning at The Naval Store
w/ Walrus
Saturday, June 6, 2026
One of the pleasures of Arrival is its willingness to trust audiences with artists who don’t necessarily explain themselves. The festival’s curation often finds common ground between acts separated by genre, generation or geography. Yet on paper, pairing Walrus with Dry Cleaning felt curious. Whether or not the pairing made sense, it certainly highlighted their differences.
Opening the evening, Walrus emerged through looping tape recordings and atmospheric textures before settling into a series of bass-forward excursions. Nick Allbrook’s latest project sits comfortably within a broader Perth psych lineage. With Allbrook at the helm rattling a lagerphone, the set drifted between desert-rock grooves, Krautrock momentum and improvised tangents. Lyndon Blue’s violin repeatedly cut against the grain, while the band’s formidable guitarist delivered riffs sharp enough to puncture the music’s otherwise freeform tendencies.
At their best, Walrus locked into hypnotic grooves that balanced propulsion with exploration. At their weakest, the band’s commitment to looseness occasionally felt treated as a virtue in itself. When Allbrook joked that the band only had a handful of songs and would simply “make up some other shit”, the remark landed awkwardly. Improvisation can be exhilarating, but it relies upon trust between performer and audience. Respect, after all, runs both ways.
Dry Cleaning arrived with considerably less fanfare. Opening with Sliced by a Fingernail, Florence Shaw’s matter-of-fact delivery of the first line, “Happy birthday to you”, cut through any lingering anticipation—a phrase that would later gain unexpected significance when the band paused for a birthday singalong for drummer Nick Buxton.
The London outfit is frequently reduced to Shaw’s spoken-word delivery, and tracks like Gary Ashby and Strong Feelings certainly remained inseparable from her distinctive blend of observation, absurdity and deadpan humour. Comparisons to Life Without Buildings or Broadcast are understandable. Yet where Sue Tompkins often sounded associative and fragmented, Shaw’s delivery was more declarative, her observations arriving wryly and self-assured.
Yet live, the band’s appeal extended far beyond the vocalist. If anything, the evening highlighted how dependent Dry Cleaning’s success is upon the interplay between its members.
Early track Blood found Shaw’s voice buried in darker frequencies before the band stripped back to a driving rhythm that suddenly brought her observations into focus. Under moody red lighting, Lewis Maynard’s bass and Nick Buxton’s drumming locked into sharper relief, providing the clean scaffolding upon which the songs increasingly relied. Throughout the set, the rhythm section emerged as a particular strength, driving the music forward with authority beneath layers of guitars, keyboards and tape loops.
The newer material from Secret Love benefited especially from this treatment. The Cute Things amplified the band’s shoegaze tendencies and flirted with singalong territory, while Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy) revealed softer shades in Shaw’s voice without sacrificing the rhythmic propulsion that anchors the band’s work. Elsewhere, Anna Calls From The Arctic began with mechanical clicks and percussion before Buxton traded drums for saxophone. In lesser hands, the instrument might have tipped towards nostalgic signifiers, but here it functioned more as texture than statement, smoothing itself into the surrounding fuzz and distortion rather than dominating it.
Older favourites such as Her Hippo and Scratchcard Lanyard were greeted enthusiastically, though one of the evening’s highlights arrived with Cruise Ship Designer. Shaw remained characteristically restrained, yet subtle gestures and facial expressions suddenly carried greater weight, while playful keyboards and maracas added movement beneath the song’s steady propulsion. By contrast, Evil Evil Idiot leaned into hypnosis: darker bass tones, eerie synths and the cadence of Shaw’s delivery combining into a slow-building spell before crashing into a pointed finale.
At over ninety minutes, the set occasionally flirted with excess. Yet it was difficult to begrudge the generosity. Rather than delivering a streamlined package, Dry Cleaning appeared committed to presenting much of Secret Love while still rewarding long-term listeners with favourites drawn from across their catalogue, including a few deep cuts from the band’s early EP material late in the evening.
By the final stretch, guitarist Tom Dowse seemed entirely lost within the music, swaying and lunging through increasingly expansive passages while Shaw followed the ebb and flow with subtle expressions and the occasional yelp. The longest instrumental sections inevitably raised a question: would Dry Cleaning remain compelling without Shaw’s voice at the centre? The answer ultimately feels beside the point. What makes the band work is the tension between observation and propulsion, between Shaw’s restraint and the increasingly expressive musicianship surrounding her.
Dry Cleaning also sidestepped one of live music’s more tired conventions. Rather than disappearing into silence, the band left behind waves of feedback and layers of distortion that continued to occupy the room after they had exited. The effect was less of a break than a lingering afterimage, a ghostly residue that kept the performance alive until their return. Encore Hit My Head All Day arrived as a fitting conclusion: a collision of defeatism and earworm pop that Dry Cleaning do so well.
For a band so often characterised as detached, Dry Cleaning proved surprisingly generous, warm and human. There was nothing mechanical about the connection forged with The Naval Store crowd. Theirs was a performance built not on spectacle, but on the slower rewards of attention and reciprocity.
CAT LANDRO
Photos by Adrian Thomson
