Secret Love Review

The band spent months demoing, including sessions at Wilco's Loft in Chicago and Gilla Band's studio in Dublin, then handed the record to Cate Le Bon and re-cut almost all of it in France in mid 2025. Her fingerprints are the whole story. Hit My Head All Day opens on six minutes of something close to funk, with a guitar figure that owes Bowie a note or two, and Shaw sings over it. Not entirely, and not comfortably, but she sings, and the deadpan she built a career on now has a second setting to play against.

That change fixes the one real charge against this band, which was that a woman reciting found phrases over post punk is a trick with a shelf life. Alexis Petridis put it plainly in the Guardian: the writing has gut level emotional impact now rather than novelty value. Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit and My Soul / Half Pint still work by collage, but the fragments are arranged toward something instead of away from it, and Joy ends the album on an optimism this group has never risked before.

Musically it is their widest record. Rocks is the heaviest thing they have put on tape, Cruise Ship Designer is gone in two and a half minutes, and the rhythm section has learned to swing where it used to march. Mojo gave it five stars, and it sits at 87 on Metacritic, universal acclaim by that scale. Eleven tracks, forty one minutes, nothing wasted.