The Last Dinner Party’s From The Pyre Reviewed: Lush and Louche Baroque Pop

There is a fissure. Look, you can see it there, just in front of you. Careful. On the one side are those en-vogue British artists currently penning bitty, grounded songs about broken beds, electricity boards, keys and bumps — think Lola Young, Sam Fender, Charli xcx, etc.. On the other are bands like the Last Dinner Party plying their lesser-spotted brand of

gothic, artsy rock. But even if it’s those former artists who have got the winds of fashionability behind them at the moment, this five piece brings out their sophomore release to heady anticipation after their 2024 debut, Prelude To Ecstasy, eased to professional plaudits and public praise alike.

In the face of the damned-if-they-do change (because it certainly wasn't broke), damned-if-they-don't change (because that's just lazy, isn't it?) conundrum, the London quintet opt to keep their second album fairly close to their first. So, if you liked Prelude, great — although Markus Dravs is now producing instead of James Ford. The band continue to plough the baroque-pop furrow it introduced us to last year, bedecking corpulent, plush instrumentation with operatic vocals. What counts is that this sounds good, nay, fantastic in places. Take the chorus of ‘Count the Ways’: it's subtle yet silky and buoyant. Dopamine splashes through the cerebrum in time with the violin strokes on ‘The Scythe’, and if you squint during the chorus of ‘This Is The Killer Speaking’ —"Ah-ah-ah" — you can already make out the bouncing throngs of sun-kissed Worthy-Farm goers.

If you think the album sleeve looks like a jumble of gothic-ness, you’re onto something: each little scene represents a song (the one with the boat is ‘Sail Away’ — your turn). From here, it follows logically enough that, thematically, the album feels in places like a series of moody snapshots taken at strange angles. As alluded to above, this free-range lyricism is certainly a breath of fresh air, but at the same time, it’s frustrating that this release feels so vacuum-sealed. It would arguably have been the mark of a confident and different second release to include something personal, something cheeky — just a few lines of studio chatter, perhaps — but you’re out of luck. The fourth wall remains firmly intact, and if you want a glimpse behind the domino mask, you’ll have to seek that out yourself.  

What’s certainly in fine fettle are Abigail Morris's pillow-cut vocals, moreish and glassy, that sprawl like lace across the compositions — try the coquettish drawl of "apocaaalypse" in ‘Agnus Dei’. Meanwhile, the guitar of Emily Roberts feels slightly crowded out in comparison. The songs do still feel ‘bigger’ than their predecessors, but this sometimes smacks more of gluttony than anything else. Take ‘Rifle’ — in four minutes 31 seconds, Dravs shoves a billiard-table groove, Mötorhead-esque riffing, an “accelerando” (where the beat gets faster), flashes of organ, and a francophone bridge into the mix. This is perhaps why ‘Sail Away’, lurking near the bottom of the track listing, is a little coup-de-coeur. Pared of the many-headed gloss of the rest of the album, it's arrestingly simple, and somehow shatteringly tragic and addicting all at once.

If Prelude To Ecstasy was the opening pass, From The Pyre is the matador’s pause a moment later: eyes glazed over, costume glinting, utterly composed. It’s an exquisite spectacle, yes, but you can’t stop yourself from wondering what might happen if they let their guard down for a second. If they let something slip. What would that look like?

Illustration by Isabella Abbott