You couldn’t even call it “hype” as quickly as The Last Dinner Party went through the roof. The debut PRELUDE TO ECSTASY charted at number one in Great Britain in 2024, now comes FROM THE PYRE, which translates as “From the Pyre”. The band comes from the background of the Brixton club The Windmill, which has produced bands such as Black Midi, Wet Leg and Black Country, New Road.
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In contrast, The Last Dinner Party sound like a hybrid of Abba, David Bowie and Kate Bush plus a good portion of 70s rock, always surrounded by the sometimes strong, sometimes tender polyphonic harmony singing. “Agnus Dei”, the first track from FROM THE PYRE, begins with a wailing guitar and then rushes off into doom with radiant glam rock: “Oh here comes the apocalypse / And I can’t enough of this.”
But that’s just the start before we go through three decades of music history. The Last Dinner Party stage themselves theatrically with costumes and either skimpy or flowing dresses, the lyrics revolve around weapons, scythes, natural disasters and flaming infernos, saints and whores, saviors and butchers – in short: they sing a little flowery about the normal everyday life of a woman in her mid-twenties. Despite the glam and the grand gesture, it’s not so much Queen but rather Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks or PJ Harvey Patin. Actually, this is music that could quickly turn into annoying, but then still reaches into the heart. You need chutzpah to do that, and so FROM THE PYRE seems incredibly modern, even though the sound seems completely out of time.
This review first appeared in Musikexpress 11/2025.