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Many of Dry Cleaning frontwoman Florence Shaw's lyrics come from her writing shards of odd poetry in a notebook of lined paper. This song finds the singer frustrated with life, so she resorts to simple pleasures as escapist experiences. They include bouncy balls, a favorite band, theme parks, and scratchcards.
Shaw described "Scratchcard Lanyard" to Rolling Stone as a revenge fantasy. "It's feeling quite pissed off and fatigued with the roles you're asked to fulfill as a woman past the age of 30," she said. "The pressure to have children is this sudden thing that descends, like, 'You're a career now.' Not that I resent any of those things in principle. Mothers are the greatest people in the world. But it was a noticeable thing, that suddenly I have these pressures that my brother and my male friends don't have."
Florence Shaw has a lyrical obsession with food. "Scratchcard Lanyard" includes references to an old sandwich, a banana, a Twix chocolate bar, and oven chips. "A lot of my writing comes from daydreaming," Shaw admitted to Uncut magazine, "just letting my mind wonder. Or it can be much more direct, whereby by I just transcribe thoughts and feedings as they come and then edit. That's a huge part of what I do - it's mainly editing, actually. My writing is supposed to be accessible: I don't want it to be mysterious, so it's possible the food is there to say something direct."
Dry Cleaning released "Scratchcard Lanyard" as their first single after signing to the 4AD label on November 19, 2020. The same day, the band made their late-night US TV debut when they performed this song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The performance came at the end of Dry Cleaning's first live shows in the US.
"Scratchcard Lanyard" is the opening track of Dry Cleaning's debut album, New Long Leg. "I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs," drummer Nick Buxton told Apple Music. "I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while, we swayed away from that thinking because we didn't want to do this cliché thing - we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it's the best thing to do for that very reason."
Dry Cleaning recorded New Long Leg with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish. Music publications and outlets critically acclaimed it upon release, with both Rough Trade and Resident Music naming it their Album of the Year. The Guardian, Paste, and Pitchfork all ranked New Long Leg in their Top 10 albums of 2021.
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