Florence Shaw (Dry Cleaning) with Sue Tompkins

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got two women whose singing styles are similar in that they’re both absolutely singular, unmistakable, and wonderfully out of step—just don’t call it spoken-word. It’s Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning and Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings.

As you’ll hear in this chat, Dry Cleaning sort of fell together in London around 2017, when the three instrumentalists approached their friend Florence Shaw to add some vocals to the music they had been writing. It turned out that Shaw’s approach—speaking dense, clearly crafted but never obvious word...