From The Last Dinner Party to Chappell Roan to Fat Dog: there’s a lot to come from these 13 artists.
Who are the best new bands and artists? This year we are also looking into the future with our hotlist. The band of the hour comes from London: The Last Dinner Party give art rock a makeover. The US musician Teezo Touchdown bends the genres to create a crazy contemporary sound. And in German pop, Levin Liam finds a new tone between rap and sensitive songwriting. You can find these and other newcomers who will shape 2024 here.
The Last Dinner Party: The Great British Renaissance
The newly crowned queens in the realm between baroque pop and indie rock: The Last Dinner Party are England’s band of the moment. The debut is appropriately called PRELUDE TO ECSTASY and is as theatrical as it is sophisticated. And the best thing: The mixture of modern Jane Austen aesthetics and guitars, of rock’n’roll and rococo was not thought up by a label, but by herself – in the smoking corners of London pubs.
In the end, it was that one evening in the pub that brought the personal breakthrough after all the endless pandemic months of waiting, planning and composing for The Last Dinner Party, they call it “the drunken evening”. By then, singer Abigail Morris, guitarists Lizzie Mayland and Emily Roberts, bassist Georgia Davies and keyboardist Aurora Nishevci had worked extensively on their vision of the perfect rock band. In theory, The Last Dinner Party were more than ready to go when they got together on that day in November 2021. But there had hardly been any rehearsals together, let alone a concert.
“We were overprepared, every tone, every gesture was perfect,” says Georgia Davies two years later. We are sitting with her and Abigail Morris in the backstage area of the Berlin Velodrome, where the band will be performing as Hozier’s opening act in the evening. Morris continues to remember the “drunken evening”: “We were allowed to play smaller concerts again and we had booked our first show in the pub The George in London’s East End,” she says. “We met for a rehearsal a week before, but it didn’t go well.” So they decided to go to the nearest pub and have a few pints. It was quite dissolute there and the atmosphere was fantastic. So euphoric, they went back to the rehearsal room and suddenly the many conversations, writing sessions and conceptual reflections erupted into the best rehearsal in the band’s history to date. Since that evening there has been a before and an after.
Before that, Morris and Australian-born Davies met at King’s College in London in 2019. They regularly go to concerts with their fellow student Emily Roberts, but the bands that they would actually like to see never play. So the friends spend the time in smoking corners, drink beer and think of the perfect band. The plan to simply form this band herself comes from Abigail, and Aurora Nishevci and Emily Roberts soon join the trio. “After that we really became classic rock students,” she says. “We watched performances by people like Queen and Bowie and studied their moves and poses. I realize this might seem a bit pretentious, but hey: it’s even meant to seem pretentious. Maybe with a little wink.”
So there wasn’t a single song when The Last Dinner Party had already decided that this band should be a total work of art in which appearance, style and performance are just as important as the music. The heroines of this story were mainly five friends who believed in the same thing. There was no management yet, no record company. They didn’t even need it back then: they simply knew it themselves. Ever since the “drunken evening” at the latest: that together they could turn the world upside down.
Afterwards, The Last Dinner Party are the indie rock band of the moment. Just six months after the “drunken evening” they played one of their first concerts in Hyde Park as the opening act for the Rolling Stones. You read that right: The band was completely unknown at the time – 500 followers on Instagram! – had become the talk of the town in London overnight. Through their furious gigs, to which more and more people came. Their song “Nothing Matters” was released in April 2023 and stormed the best lists, and last summer Last Dinner Party played at the Glastonbury Festival. Today their videos receive seven-figure click numbers, they are shared wildly on TikTok, the British “NME” dedicated a cover story to them and they won the “Rising Star” prize at the Brit Awards. A year and a half has passed since the “drunken evening”.
And because this is not the end but the actual beginning of this story, the band’s first album, PRELUDE TO ECSTASY, will be released in February. “It was always clear that we wanted to do an album as a total work of art in the old-fashioned way, not EPs or individual songs,” says Morris. They recorded it at The Church Studios in London and produced it by Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford. “James is immune to any kind of hype and the celebrity aspect of pop,” says Morris, “so he gave us that Excitement taken away, he was perfect for us.”
PRELUDE TO ECSTASY is structured in the style of an orchestral suite. There is a prelude, a coda and the wistful interlude “Gjuha,” in which Aurora Nishevci laments in Albanian that she doesn’t speak her parents’ language properly. Nishevci studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she wrote and conducted the orchestral passages. “It’s a blessing to have Aurora in the band,” says Davies. “We actually just wanted to have a keyboardist and suddenly we had this powerhouse. She’s a genius.”
Abigail Morris wrote the basis for most of the songs on the piano. With a voice in the energy field between Florence Welch and Freddie Mercury, she sings about Catholicism, female anger, feminism, but above all about love in all its shades, i.e. about broken hearts, toxic relationships, you name it. “There’s just a timeless urgency to writing about intimacy, loss, lust, heartbreak,” Morris says. But, for example, “Nothing Matters” is also about rock’n’roll topoi that don’t seem very contemporary, such as cars and motorcycles. “Bitches and shitty cars, man, babes and engines, that’s my thing!” says Morris, laughing. So they have a sense of humor too.
They recorded the album mostly live, and you can hear all the inspirations: you hear that Georgia Davies did her master’s degree in Victorian horror literature, that Emily Roberts studied jazz guitar, Abigail studied English literature and Lizzie studied art history. You can hear how romance, rococo and the aesthetics of Sofia Coppola’s films were incorporated into the conception and the music of Arcade Fire, Florence And The Machine, Fleetwood Mac, Siouxsie and The Banshees, ABBA and so many others. PRELUDE TO ECSTASY is the best debut album by a British rock band since Arctic Monkeys’ WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT’S WHAT I’M NOT. That was 18 years ago. Since then, nothing has been as unpopular as the romantic model of the rock band. “I assume that we are part of a great renaissance,” says Abigail Morris. “After the long pandemic period, people have a need for this kind of community experience.”
The Last Dinner Party now leaves out one rock’n’roll cliché: Since the “drunken evening” they have only performed sober. The rush from back then continues to this day.
Where: London
For fans of: Kate Bush, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Florence & The Machine, “Bridgerton”, Sofia Coppola, Lana Del Rey
Playing tips: “Burn Alive”, “Nothing Matters”
New music: the hotly anticipated debut album will be released on February 2nd
Live: February 16th in Berlin, February 17th in Cologne, February 26th in Vienna
(Torsten Gross)
Who else is there?
Regardless of whether it’s rave punk, dark pop or soul: On the following pages we will introduce you to the following newcomers: