Unsmart Lady

The guitars here are almost jittery, locked into a rhythm that keeps threatening to unspool but never does, held together by a bass line that moves with deliberate heaviness under everything. There is a kind of sardonic energy to the production — it is bright but not warm, clinical in the way a fluorescent-lit room is clinical. Florence Shaw's delivery leans into a register somewhere between deadpan lecturing and overheard thought, her voice landing on unexpected syllables with a slight edge that reads as either dry humor or veiled menace depending on the moment. The lyrical content draws on self-scrutiny in an oblique way, assembling images that feel plucked from the real world — mundane and specific — until their accumulation suggests something about inadequacy and performance without ever being earnest about it. Dry Cleaning made their name through this kind of controlled affectlessness, arriving with New Long Leg at the exact moment post-punk became the grammar of a certain anxious British art-school sensibility. This is the song for commuting past people whose inner lives you will never access, or for standing in a queue feeling quietly estranged from yourself.