Dry Cleaning Announce Reissue of First Two EPs Out on 8 March

Dry Cleaning will reissue their first two EPs, Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks / Sweet Princess, on 8 March 2024. Remastered to celebrate the release, Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess will be pressed as one single vinyl. The former will be available on cassette for the first time and include an exclusive bonus single, a demo of New Long Leg single, ‘Strong Feelings’, recorded during the sessions for Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks. Today, the band has shared a new visualiser for the song ‘Sit Down Meal’, the first in a series of new visualisers created for all tracks across the EP by original ‘Magic of Meghan’ video collaborator Lucy Vann.

Check out the visualiser for ‘Sit Down Meal’ HERE or via the player below.

To coincide with the reissues, Dry Cleaning will head back on the road this March and April for headline sets that will lean heavily on songs from Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess. The tour will offer fans the chance to see the band play in more intimate venues like Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club and East London’s EartH theatre, and honour US shows that were postponed in 2020 (including SXSW and Treefort festivals). Tickets will go on sale this Friday 19 January – full tour dates are listed below and for tickets and information, head HERE.

The EPs will be reissued on single vinyl featuring the original artwork and lyric sheet. Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks / Sweet Princess will be available digitally, on standard black LP, transparent blue LP (indie variant), CD and cassette from 8 March. To pre-order head HERE.

After a prolific 18-month period releasing two critically acclaimed John Parish-produced studio albums, New Long Leg (2021) and Stumpwork (2022), as well as last year’s companion release the five-track Swampy EP, South London’s Dry Cleaning are taking a moment to reflect on their journey and pay homage to their roots.

Dry Cleaning’s origin story is well known by now. Guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been friends and musical collaborators for years, and invited mutual friend Florence Shaw – a visual artist, picture researcher and drawing lecturer – to join the band in 2017. With clear musical influences from the Feelies, the Necessaries, the B52s and Pylon, and constrained by the small garage space they rehearsed in, Dry Cleaning were drawn to making simple music; direct and uncomplicated, anything superfluous was left behind.

By March 2018 the group had recorded the six-track debut EP Sweet Princess with producer Kristian Craig Robinson at Total Refreshment Centre in a single day. Two months later, in May 2018, the band played their first live show in Dalston at the Shacklewell Arms, and released the EP in August. Sweet Princess was a thrilling debut, its dizzying and restless instrumentals with Shaw’s sardonic vocals delivering a satirical collage of witty observations and social commentary. A further 6 songs in the form of the Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EP quickly followed two months after. It was named in tribute to the band’s rehearsal space in Maynard’s family’s south London (Sidcup) home, and to his mother Susan whose home-cooked meals sustained the four friends in between sessions. With singles like ‘Sit Down Meal’ and ‘Viking Hair’, Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks is a powerful companion to Sweet Princess. They share a similar pent-up energy, unsurprising given they came to life in the same environment those EPs were created in, an environment that had a huge influence on the band during those formative years.

Praise for Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks

“This young London quartet is effortlessly magnetic and impossibly British, with an ace card in Florence Shaw—a vocalist who rarely deigns to sing but, rather, presents her lyrics as if engaged in an apathetic phone conversation.” – New Yorker
  
“Like empty bottles melted down and repurposed as stained glass, Dry Cleaning’s assembled observations capture the distortion of life on and off the internet, of spewing our deepest emotions into an anonymous void but biting our tongue when we encounter a real person. Type what you really feel, then close the tab and delete your history—maybe Florence Shaw will find it.” – Pitchfork

“Dead cats, Royal weddings, phone scams, anxiety, YouTube comments, art gallery bores – all the devils of rubbish modern Britain are here.” – Loud & Quiet
  
On ‘Goodnight’: “the sardonic execution of lines parsed from various YouTube comments sections for recent track ‘Goodnight’ is a wild ride, its subject matter darting between dead pets and spitting cum onto a Travelodge carpet.” – NME
  
“This isn’t the future of post punk we’re witnessing but the birth of post everything.” – Under The Radar
  
“It’s a debut collection that’s far from ordinary.” – Stereogum