The Last Dinner Parties have arrived at the right time
“We think that art always responds subconsciously to things that are in the political and public zeitgeist. Post-punk emerged as a product of the Brexit era of austerity – people wanted to be fiercely angry about it. And then after Covid, instead, he just wanted to have fun. We have come at the right time, now that people need this. It’s an alignment of planets”, they reflect, not wrongly, when talking about success.
Rock’n’roll, alternative, sensual, fluid, free: the Last Dinner Party perfectly embodies it zeitgeistit spirit of their time. They are a group of girls, five in all, who with their proudly freak visual and sound aesthetics they conquered everyone quickly – perhaps too quickly – managing to load their debut album with gigantic hype even before the announcement. “Prelude to ecstasy” comes out today, culminating a meteoric rise that started with the first performances in London clubs and then continued with the opening of the show Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, the victory of Rising Star at the Brit Awards (the statuette that is awarded upon the revelation of the latest recording season, which placed the group in line with Adele, Florence and the Machine, Tom Odell, Sam Smith and James Bay), the triumph at BBC Sound of 2024 (beating Kenya Grace and Peggy Gou, the DJ of “Nanana”). And she does not disappoint expectations.
Cryptic, enigmatic, almost metaphysical. Last Dinner Parties are not meant to be for everyone. And they don’t want to sound like everyone else: “We grew up surrounded by the music of artists like Kate Bush, David Bowie, or Queen, we would be lying if we said we weren’t influenced or inspired by these great artists.
But we want to sound like Last Dinner Party,” they say. Sophisticated arrangements (they worked on the album’s twelve tracks – the first is an overture that lasts a minute and a half, an explosion of strings, woodwind and brass – together with James Ford, former right-hand man of the Arctic Monkeys), refined sounds, texts full of symbolic images: .Abigail Morris (vocals), Georgia Davies (bass), Lizzie Mayland (guitar), Aurora Nishevci (keyboards) and Emily Roberts (lead guitar) they are told in a way that is both repelling and extremely fascinating. From “Burn alive” to “Mirror”, passing through “Sinner” and “Portrait of a dead girl”, the Last Dinner Party in the era of algorithms they are proof that algorithms are meant to be proudly ignored.
In “Prelude to ecstasy” Abigail Morris and her companions sing and play their diversity: “I am not the girl I set out to be / let me make my grief a commodity”, “I am not the girl I decided to be / let me to turn my pain into merchandise”, they sing in “Burn alive”, as if they were modern Joan of Arc. The myth of the French national heroine, burned alive at the age of twenty and today considered aante litteram feminist iconis explicitly brought up in “My lady of mercy”: Oh, rest your feet on me my lady of mercy / strike me, pierce me straight through the heart”, / hit me, stab me straight in the heart”.
“.Talk about being a girl. She is a girl who looks at a painting of Joan of Arc for the first time and she thinks that she seems so brave and so beautiful that she wants to kiss her. And maybe she also wants to kiss the girl next to her in the school choir. We’re expanding the world of The Last Dinner Party to include a darker, heavier atmosphere. The lyrics explore the anguish of an adolescent crush that can only be described through the bloody and carnal language of religious experience, while the sound world takes inspiration from Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey and Roxy Music,” they explain.
A little shoegaze, a little Sparks and a little (a lot) of Kate Bush (just listen to songs like “The feminine urge”, “Beautiful boy” and “Sinner”, which is not a tribute to the new tennis champion). Even the Last Dinner Party references are freaks: “We are like magpies, we continually collect ideas and visual identities.” Those among the early fans who accused them of essentially selling themselves after signing the contract with a multinational, Universal, will have to think again: “Did the trolls expect us to say, “No thanks, we’d rather fight” after being offered a record deal?”. They will arrive in Italy at the end of the month February 25thon the stage of Tuscan Santeria in Milan: forbidden to miss.
