Do you remember when you first saw Freddie Mercury performing? How about Sparks, or The Spice Girls? From struggling to find a space to rehearse due to the covid-era lockdown, The Last Dinner Party went Top 20 with debut single Nothing Matters in 2023, and their rapid ascent feels as culturally momentous as witnessing the birth of Roxy Music.
It’s indie, Bryan, but not as we know it, as TLDP have within their arsenal a unique weapon in the shape of Abigail Morris. Semi-operatic, supremely confident and having as nu-romantic-looking a time as Siouxsie Sioux appearing in a Wim Wenders period drama, Morris is deliriously compelling.
The band’s name - the ‘Last’ added after a Rolling Stones support gig - comes from the very un-woke notion of celebrating a huge dinner banquet in Bacchanalian frenzy style, and the art school opera contained within Prelude To Ecstasy could have been dismissed as yet-more-corporate-indie-packaging were it not for the unfinished glee emanating from the five members of the band.
They’ve already supported The Stones and Hozier, and even won a bloody Brit award (ok that’s how many will have come to hear about them), but there’s some intelligence-of-craft that shines through in this songwriting. Nothing Matters is a wonderfully chorused, paean to nihilism; Intro is an ambitious yet convincing minute or so of fantasy-classical music; but Caesar on a TV Screen (Laurence Olivier?) and particularly Portrait of a Dead Girl are stunning and mesmerising in equal measure.
Morris’s lyrics are observantly intelligent, aware she’s as much a product as participant in a spectacle, and asking for more all the same. ...Dead Girl has an 80s power ballad, high glam energy and scope of surprise that has the power to leave you joyous-if-open-to-it. The pairing of ...Dead Girl and Nothing Matters is one of the best double acts since Moonage Daydream and Starman on David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, adding bewilderment to astonishment.
Piano ripples, suddenly occurring thoughts and phrases and intriguingly exciting chord changes tumble merrily over each other throughout these songs, infused brilliantly by Lizzie Mayland, Emily Roberts, Georgia Davies, Aurora Nishevci and Morris. There is a feeling of unslanted, pent-up energy of those weird lockdown times being expressed in the most genuinely affirmative way four London art school alumni know. A joyful, intriguing, kaleidoscopic debut album.
Sean Bw Parker
Listen to Prelude To Ecstasy Here: