The Last Dinner Party is a good band name. Biblical, ravenous, damned; fantastical, formal, mysteriously ill-fated. It’s a real grande bouffe, and the gothic London five-piece has at all of it on their first album. Prelude to Ecstasy spills over with baroque flourishes, ribboning woodwinds, hairpin turns—throwing their waltzing shoes in a lake one minute and yanking on swashbuckling pirate boots the next—and massive guitar solos, not to mention all the blood, sin, and suffering. These 12 songs are richly upholstered in velvet and primed to soundtrack Emerald Fennell bacchanals. The indulgence is the point, they’ve said, an “unapologetic” strike against contemporary music that holds back “for fear of not being cool or for looking like you’re trying too hard,” as bassist Georgia Davies told Rolling Stone: the glam ethos reborn in plissé and corsetry. Yet despite these raging appetites, the tablecloth at their boundless banquet remains curiously unstained.
Now in their mid-twenties, TLDP met as students and swore in the smoking areas of South London post-punk gigs that they could conjure a more brilliant offering than the dour bands on stage. Sleek footage from their third show, filmed by a DIY guy with precedent for talent-spotting, sparked a label bidding war won by Island. They’ve started 2024 on the front foot, as winners of the BBC Sound Of… poll and the Brits Rising Star award. Throw in fancy management and an early Rolling Stones support slot (albeit first on at a stacked day festival) and you have a textbook “industry plant” furor, which they have rubbished and refashioned as a compliment: “If people think it’s too good to be true, then all we can say is thank you,” said Davies. (Is it too cynical to wonder if industry-plant allegations are now a perversely useful marketing tool, allowing an act to define itself in opposition to sexist low expectations? Probably.) While Prelude to Ecstasy is surely testament to their own distinct vision—Regency Fiona, Taylor’s “The Man” but make it Emily Dickinson—it’s also staunchly professional, of a piece with much major-label British indie of the early 2010s.
For songs that deal with the emotional violence meted out to women and queer people, there’s not much mess in TLDP’s proggy proficiency, the kind that glam originally stubbed its cigs out on. The album starts with a rococo orchestral prelude complete with harp, church bells, and a muted take on the “dun dun duuun!” stinger that signals shock horror, written by keys player and composer Aurora Nishevci. It works as a draped-curtain reveal onto the album’s decadent world, but like what follows, it’s thick with polish and intent. James Ford’s production is clean, opulent, and thundering, and evokes the crack session personnel of musical theater: the Peaky Blinders twang of “The Feminine Urge,” the martial “Running up That Hill” pummeling of “Burn Alive” as their voices careen unto the breach, the burnished spaciousness of lounge lizard-era Arctic Monkeys on “On Your Side.” Vocalist Abigail Morris is ostentatiously mannered, pirouetting through scales and moods with a sneer familiar from Marina and the Diamonds’ first album. Before the band took off, guitarist Emily Roberts played Brian May in a Queen tribute band, and the heavy winks to Freddie & co. in the staccato piano and brawny riffage of “Sinner” and “Portrait of a Dead Girl” both eject you from TLDP’s reverie and tease flights of fancy not taken; similarly, while the band is often compared to Sparks, their nailed-on, festival-ready choruses lack the vibrating lunatic fervor that makes Ron and Russell Mael so thrilling.
It’s all very Florence and the Rube Goldberg Machine, and depending on your taste for ripeness, your mileage may vary. At any rate, this tidiness needlessly buffs the unpredictability of their best songs, which should sound as reckless as their scene changes. “Nothing Matters” leaps from a sardonic, courtly swoon to a chant of bitter self-debasement, admirably churning up bile in the process. “Caesar on a TV Screen” is a mini rock opera, vaulting from seething torch song to preening indie-disco chorus to full-blown Wagnerian triumph: an account of feeling monstrous and repressed that swaggers with uncontainable desire, Morris’s scathing vocals a defiantly buoyant shipwreck. There is by now a fairly mainstream line of thought about the radicalism of women and gender non-conformists (guitarist Lizzie Maynard is non-binary) taking up space or subverting rock (and there are, indeed, many lusty guitar solos here); the recent success of Poor Things reflects the cultural appetite for a woman’s shameless decadence. It would be too easy to slot TLDP into that mentality; although they lunge hungrily between styles, their expansiveness comes off less like showy conquest than a reflection of the conflict in Morris’s lyrics, which seethe with disgust at how it feels to realize you’re the main course.
When Morris chants, over the doomy thrust of proper opener “Burn Alive,” “I am not the girl I set out to be/Let me make my grief a commodity,” it suggests a smart wink at a culture prone to valuing a woman’s art by the depth of her suffering. But what follows really is quite a lot of willful suffering in destructive situations: “There is candle wax melting in my veins/So I keep myself standing in your flames,” the song continues. Elsewhere there is much bloody supplication and biting, and it might get a bit Twilight were it not for some sharp writing about this rum bind. Rather than subversion, they go full immersion: “Here comes the feminine urge, I know it so well/To nurture the wounds my mother held,” they sing with a joyous eye-roll at the rigmarole. The (otherwise slightly sickly) ren-faire balladry of “Beautiful Boy” asks, “What good are red lips when you’re faced with something sharp?,” clocking the rigged game of beauty-as-power.
What could seem a bit passive and in thrall to pain deepens thanks to a few songs wise to the ways that love and pain got entwined in the first place. On “Sinner,” Maynard bares their teeth at the homophobic smallmindedness that compromised their desires and stole their innocence; the ecstatic thrash of “My Lady of Mercy” fantasizes about the Virgin Mary, Morris stealing her back from Catholic censure as the band sounds ready to take off. These are well-worn archetypes, but the Last Dinner Party, attacking them for the first time at an age where life’s color is still hypersaturated, make them newly vivid. You crave a little more wreckage in their wake—a more wanton relinquishing of control, perhaps—but their abundant debut more or less lets them have their cake and eat it.
