After a year of cultivating a kind of mythology around their live shows ‒ if you want to hear The Last Dinner Party’s music, you’ll need to go and see them ‒ the fast-rising London band are finally breaking the spell of mystery. After paving the way with a handful of singles, they’ve now announced plans for a debut album early next year.
Titled Prelude To Ecstasy, it's out on February 2, via Island Records. In an interview with The Standard earlier this year, the band described their debut as “really weird”.
“Every song is very different,” lead singer Abigail Morris said. “I feel like there is not another song like Nothing Matters on the record… it’s just a vast range of genres, sounds, ideas and emotions.” Overall, she says, it’s about “ecstasy in every sense of the word… like extreme joy and extreme agony and finding pleasure in being able to feel all those things.”
The album news comes shortly after The Last Dinner Party made their TV debut on Later... with Jools Holland – and they’re currently midway through their first ever US tour.
“Ecstasy is a pendulum which swings between the extremes of human emotion, from the ecstasy of passion to the sublimity of pain, and it is this concept which binds our album together,” write the band in a statement.
“This is an archeology of ourselves; you can exhume our collective and individual experiences and influences from within its fabric. We exorcised guitars for their solos, laid bare confessions directly from diary pages, and summoned an orchestra to bring our vision to life. It is our greatest honour and pride to present this offering to the world, it is everything we are.”
Produced by Arctic Monkeys and Foals collaborator James Ford, Prelude To Ecstasy was recorded in London, and contains a whole host of The Last Dinner Party live staples. Gig favourite On Your Side, out now, is the latest single, following on from Nothing Matters, Sinner, and My Lady Of Mercy.
“On Your Side is a love song with its hands tied. It’s about being so devoted to someone that no matter what they do, no matter how much it hurts, how much you know you should leave, you can’t escape,” said the band.
“The outro came from a wonderful improvised moment in the studio; James Ford had this synthesiser that warped and delayed and played with the fabric of whatever you put into it. So Aurora and Abigail sat in the studio after lunch and improvised some piano and vocal lines, letting the sounds build on top of each other until that final gasp. It turned into this wrenching shimmering section that sounds like the end of a poisonous relationship; dissolving, fragmenting, painful but also ultimately freeing.”
Prelude To Ecstasy is out on February 2, 2024
