Underpinning The Last Dinner Party’s polished, Rococo-era aesthetic is an epic striving for greatness. When the London-formed five-piece crashed into the indie consciousness two years ago, they arrived seemingly fully-formed, with a fairytale arc to their origin story. Major record labels had clamoured over them after YouTube footage of a set at the tiny Windmill pub in Brixton gathered momentum in late 2022, leading to a deal with Island.
The success of the storming and anthemic debut single “Nothing Matters” made the group, alongside recent Billboard U.K. cover stars Wet Leg, a rare British guitar band from the last few years admitted to the genre’s increasingly rarefied upper echelons. It was a remarkable rise, though perhaps what’s more admirable is how The Last Dinner Party turned all of that immediate attention into a foundation for longevity as a unit.
Rather than blast straight into the theaters it could have filled, the group toured smaller venues and took a step back from media commitments in order to grow their confidence as performers, honing one of the most energetic live shows on the circuit. Yet in the U.K., The Last Dinner Party’s swift ascent became subject to scrutiny online, with the term “industry plant” disproportionately thrown its way; images of early gigs from 2021 onwards, however, show that the band had been steadily gathering a cult following for years prior to its mainstream crossover moment.
By early 2024, their BRIT and Mercury Prize-nominated debut LP Prelude to Ecstasy reached the top of the Official U.K. Albums Chart with the biggest opening week for a debut by a band in the U.K. since 2015. Unlike its explosively successful predecessor, which was buoyed by tight, richly-decorated pop melodies, new record From the Pyre is darker and more ambitious. These 10 songs see The Last Dinner Party weave tales of greed and obsession, hinting at a fabulist side to its writing by pulling from Greek mythology, and references such as Joan Of Arc, apocalyptic imagery and the Medieval age.
With an extensive U.K. headline tour on the horizon, including first-time arena billings, From the Pyre arrives as The Last Dinner Party makes good on years of industry hype with a definitive artistic statement. Consider the moment met. See our ranking of the 10 songs from From the Pyre below.
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“Sail Away”
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}Love and loss are twin pillars of much of the songwriting across From the Pyre, but “Sail Away” pays attention to the space in between: a relationship hitting a rough patch, in need of some reinvigoration. A lullaby-like arrangement floats along, one that sounds like the sonic equivalent of weeping into your pillow. This is proof that the band can be just as deft with the simple and soulful as they are with scorched-earth pop songs.
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“This Is the Killer Speaking”
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}Throughout their time as a band, The Last Dinner Party have long mythologised the everyday, wrapping up tales of relationships gone awry and growth in roving melodies. Rattling along at high speed through a Western-influenced arrangement, “This Is the Killer Speaking” is packed with layers of guitars, harmonies and percussion, always teetering on the edge of chaos.
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“Count the Ways”
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}This infernally catchy ditty pairs one of the most effervescent arrangements on From the Pyre with the album’s most sorrowful account of romantic hopelessness – an extension of the band’s own pop subversiveness. “Stretch my hand out/ It freezes in the air/ There wasn’t anybody there,” vocalist Abigail Morris sings at one point. As lofty as it all sounds, “Count the Ways” is easy to love, with genuine replay value.
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“Second Best”
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}“Second Best” is a concentrated blast of The Last Dinner Party at their most charismatic, both a salute to their heroes Sparks and their own swaggering stamp on the band’s strobing art-pop. Here, unrequited love is presented as something frightening and bombastic; the drums get feverish, while guitarist Emily Roberts’ backing vocals take on animalistic qualities: mewing, screeching, yelping – all creating a feeling of near-breathlessness.
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“Agnus Dei”
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}The thrust and surrender of Morris’ voice on this swashbuckling opener mimics the thrill of shedding anxieties – heartbreak, doubt, contending with her position in the public eye – as, lyrically, she scales as a mountain of self-actualisation. With the zeal of a theatre kid, she roars, dialling the drama to 11 in order to seize her moment, commanding space over blasts of brass and a strutting, tastefully overblown guitar line.
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“Woman Is a Tree”
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}As The Last Dinner Party have mastered their distinct brand of musical melodrama, it’s easy to forget that when they pare things back, they can knock you over with a feather. Lean in and listen close to “Woman Is a Tree,” a folk-horror tale that epitomizes the band’s sonic shift towards a grittier, earthier tone than the opulent baroque stylings of their debut. The finished product is quietly obsessed with ideas of paranoia and decay, with an atonal vocal piece that’s striking in its simplicity.
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“I Hold Your Anger”
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}Across From the Pyre, the band shine brightest on slow-burning songs of anguish and painful desperation. “I Hold Your Anger” untangles a series of thematic threads, a hypnotic track that shrinks and swells as keyboardist Aurora Nishevci details a lucid dream – in which an arm is cut off and lost – as well as big, debilitating questions around motherhood. It’s within this wreckage she finds the fortitude to raise her voice.
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“Rifle”
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}“Rifle” builds up so serenely, it snaps almost imperceptibly into focus. The band’s urgency binds everything together on this riot of textures and ideas: a bridge sung entirely in French, a swirl of crescendoing guitars and howling operatics, emotional chaos. Betrayal may be the song’s lyrical fuel, but the overarching feeling proves itself to be one of ease, unburdening and independence regained.
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“The Scythe”
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}When Morris sings “Open me up/ Butcher my heart,” time stops. A sumptuous ballad that evokes the most wistful strains of vintage soul, “The Scythe” displays the frontwoman’s tone in all its husky glory, octaves jumping like a catch in the throat, injecting each line with a potent mix of defiance and regret. A strummed guitar is joined by shimmering drum patterns low in the mix; as effects slowly layer, the track unfurls with the eye-widening feeling of an epiphany coming on.
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“Inferno”
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}Now two years removed from its breakthrough moment – and all of the discourse it subsequently became shrouded in – closer “Inferno” reckons with the speed and intensity of The Last Dinner Party’s ascent. Yet there’s an unhurried emotional logic to the track’s structure, mirroring a gradual understanding of the members’ own agency as individuals and that the early narrative surrounding them could be destroyed and rebuilt. Pushing the confessional appeal to a sizzling extreme, this is a bracing, collective display of vulnerability.
