This January is a pretty fun month for new releases which makes it harder to choose what to disseminate for our very first Janky Fresh Friday of 2026. We thought we had it easy with Dry Cleaning releasing new music and we decided to go with Bad Beat’s Xmas day release as the split single of this article. But it’s not always easy when you have mixed feelings about something new from a band you love and that is a first for Janky Fresh Friday…. I’m sure it’s not the last.
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Dry Cleaning: Secret Love (released January 9, 2026): 4AD Records
The kings and queens of deadpan post punk are back with Dry Cleaning’s kickoff to 2026, Secret Love. When Dry Cleaning first appeared on the scene, I was all about it, making it a point to catch their highly anticipated Teragram Ballroom introduction to Los Angeles. Seeing them again at Primavera Sound, they had refined their music by then and fully manifested everything anyone could’ve wanted from a deadpan, vocal driven post punk band.
That style of vocal was something I was wanting to hear from a modern band for a long time before I had Dry Cleaning. I was a fan of Sonic Youth, The Fall, and Wire, but even they seemed to veer out of that style of playing, not hitting the no wave bullseye on the mark quite as perfectly as Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw.
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As a lover of Jim Jarmusch movies, New York No Wave, Burroughs, and all that jazz, I wanted an band to satisfy my beatnik poetry desires to come out on wax. For the longest time, Dry Cleaning did that, making music that was perfect to smoke cigarettes to next to an open Manhattan third-floor window. There was a black and white element to the music. An New York fashion quality wrapped in French apathy and coolness but dripping with British sophistication and dry humor.
After a few years refining this sound and taking the style as far as it could go, one might expect Dry Cleaning to become a one trick pony. Now though, with “Secret Love”, the album starts with a full on rejection of that notion. With “Hit My Head All Day,” the band shoots out the gate with a cool, heavy stomp sound that feels almost industrial. It’s urban, dark, and freaky, reminiscent of Bowie glam guitars but Nine Inch Nails beats beneath Florence’s singing. The band has always been heavy. I remember the guitarist, Tom Dowse rocking a Voivod shirt when I saw them, so it’s no surprise to hear those influences coming out in their sound here.
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“Cruise Ship Designer” sort of undermines the progress made with “Hit My Head All Day,” falling back into old forms the band has already perfected. Monotone vocals, apathetic lyrics, post modern singing that feels like a sonic Modigliani or something. It’s still cool, but how far can cool take any band?
“My Soul / Half Pint” is the perfect alternative music to go on a long walk with headphones on to. The music’s math perfectly aligns with your steps and internal beat. It’s got a noise rock element in a very subtle way but feels more like a Pavement song.
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“Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)” is a slower, lo fi piece of poetry over music. The backing vocal that provides melody was a refreshing departure from the usual that I wish I could hear more of.
“Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” is a jangly guitar song that feels folky but with an electronic edge and enlightened drum beat. Florence’s tone is contemplative against serene ambience, and as layers of vocal come into the song to complicate the barrage of sound, her voice takes on a steady signal through the noise, like a brain that can’t get off a mistake, regret, or desire.
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“Blood” is a more brooding track, featuring the most beatnik poetry moment of the record, with some serene undertones worked in to give the track and album a more unique character.
“Evil Evil Idiot” comes on slow, like Chinese water torture drops of precious music hitting your eardrum. Once the jagged, Albini inspired guitar work snakes its way into the track, you’re snapped out of the tired daze you feel when you think this is just gonna be more aimless poetry. The poetry this time isn’t aimless either. It’s not just any old words and concepts juxtaposed together to conjure up cool imagery. Florence Shaw runs off a list of all kinds of evil happenings on this track.
“Rocks” is a garage guitar driven ripper that closes the case that Dry Cleaning’s evolution on “Secret Love” has been 90% sonic but only 10% lyrical or conceptual. When the vocal doesn’t evolve with the music one bit, the total package of each song still feels stagnant no matter what experiments are going on otherwise.
“The Cute Things” is the best track on the album, a Gang of Four feeling post punk mathsterpiece. Showing a range of vocal styles and guitar work that sometimes goes on a Night in the Tropics bent, this song had me jamming out in such freaky fashion I could’ve made a clip of myself dancing like one of the many unique characters that accompany every song when you stream it. Because these little clips are all part of the album’s package, I get the vibe that Dry Cleaning’s “Secret Love” is wanting to express the poetry of the ordinary, the art of the every, and the freakiness we all have the power to tap into and should.
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“I Need You” is able to communicate longing with such a beautiful sonic landscape. Florence’s vocal here is sparse too, as if there are too many feelings to put into words and that the silence in each pause speaks higher volumes than the lyrics.
The album’s closer, “Joy,” rocks rather hard, like a more garage feeling classic alternative jam. The guitars remind me of R.E.M. here. Florence’s vocal takes on more life and vibrance than the rest of the album, animated by softer feelings, as if dropping the coy facade.
Overall, I can’t hate on Dry Cleaning. They’re a very talented band with a beautiful vision. There are plenty of great, transcendent moments on this album, others that feel like a slog, others that are just more of the same. Two albums of deadpan poetry about nothing over wild music is fine. After three, I’m already bored.
How much poetry can you actually take before you get up off your pillow and leave the room of listeners sitting Indian style in a circle around someone reciting nonsense so you can go outside and smoke a cigarette, then leaving without saying goodbye to anyone?
I just feel like in 2025, they should respond to a world this fucked up by giving us more than what we expect out of them.
Bad Beat: EP 2025 (released December 25, 2025): Triple B Records
Triple B Records started off 2026 with an early Christmas gift, giving us “EP 2025” by Bad Beat, a follow-up to their “LP 2025” that released over summer. Bad Beat was one of the most talked about up-and-coming hardcore bands of 2025 and it’s obvious why; their incorporation of powerviolence reminiscent of early Ceremony and Outbreak is a gap that has long needed to be filled. While most hardcore coming out nowadays is focused on heavy breakdowns and mosh calls, Bad Beat simplifies the genre to its purest form by playing as rapidly and aggressively as possible. If you are a punk rocker who doesn’t follow the hardcore scene at all, whether it’s due to the genre’s metallic tone or you have a hatred of hardcore dancing, then you owe it to yourself to check out this newest Bad Beat EP. It has the soul of an 80’s hardcore punk record; a quality that is very hard to come by nowadays.
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Although this newest release only comes in at 7 minutes long consisting of 5 songs, its short length really makes each track stand out on their own; and I can’t imagine a more satisfying format to consume Bad Beat’s music in. Again – like their ability to capture the spirit of classic hardcore punk and bring us back to the powerviolence influence of the early 00’s, Bad Beat is bringing the EP back and it’s easy to forget just how much the genre has changed as it grows in popularity. It’s far less common we see unconventional releases like demos, EP’s, and splits nowadays and the scene feels a bit less hardcore because of that. Bad Beat’s sound is so classic ’06 hardcore that you could tell me that this EP was a Myspace release and I’d believe you.
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Bad Beat comes right out of the gate swinging on this newest release with a groovy beat that commands the listener to jump in the pit to two-step instantly. Vocalist Jimmy Lawson has the sort of unhinged, snarling vocals that really stand out amongst the guttural or shrieking sort of vocals you hear from most hardcore bands in 2025; really evoking the sort of dangerous chaos felt in Ceremony’s ’06 demo. Lyrics like “We don’t need your help. Just leave us alone. We can do it on our own” may be uplifting, but Lawson’s delivery makes these lines sound more like a direct threat than anything to be inspired by. It’s nice to hear heavy hitting hardcore music that you can actually understand the lyrics of for a change, as the sing-along stage pile-on nature of hardcore music has been absent in recent years.
After the groovy straight-forward sound of the opening, Bad Beat throws the breakdown heavy “Bad Beat Stomp – The Third” at us with full intensity. Yes, it is a sequel to two previous “Bad Beat Stomps” but this may be the heaviest one yet. It has the sort of slow, repetitive riff that really makes you want to start slam-dancing and shoving everybody around you. We need more breakdowns like this in hardcore that actually promote dancing, rather than just tough guy crowdkilling for TikTok views.
The next track “Braniac” further expands on this slower breakdown nature before speeding up to rapid chaos at the end of the track with lyrics like “You’re a fucking fraud. It all feels wrong, because you don’t belong here. Do you care about this scene? You’ll never get just what this means to me. And you never fucking will”. Bad Beat’s entire nature from their artwork to their early 00’s influence is poser-repellant in the strongest way possible. We need more hardcore bands like this that are aggressively anti-outsider, especially with the scene’s recent growth in popularity that inevitably has withered away its punk ethos.
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“Finally Free” is a straight forward minute-long blast of aggression that is broken up by its infectiously catchy bassline halfway through, reminding me of the more dance-y parts of Minor Threat songs. It’s actually kind of insane that Minor Threat would even need to be mentioned when talking about a hardcore band’s influences in their sound, but hardcore has really transformed so much over the years that many newer bands have forgotten their roots. Bad Beat is the sort of crucial punk band that holds the scene together and keeps the ethos of hardcore alive, even when facing a state of constant evolution.
The finale to this short, yet effective EP, the song “Chained” almost feels like it could be 3 separate song even though it clocks in at only 1:34 minutes. The heavy high-pitched distorted guitars at the beginning of the track act as a siren warning everybody who hears it that the mosh pit is about to open up, and it’s about to get hectic. Lawson jumps into manic, frenzied vocals at lightning speed before a more thrash-metal influenced breakdown that really leaves the listener wanting more, feeling almost jarring when it ends.
This whole EP feels like being thrown into the middle of a battlefield and being left confused when the warfare starts. If you’re looking for some straight-forward hardcore that returns the spirit of the scene to the more punk-minded era of the early 00’s, I can’t recommend Bad Beat enough. This is a band we will absolutely be seeing blow up in the future. Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do as an artist is to stick to your roots in the most unapologetic fashion, especially when your peers seem to have forgotten them.
Dry Cleaning review by Robert Shepyer
Bad Beat review by Danny Ryan
