The Last Dinner Party on gaining confidence, navigating grief, and their show-stopping second album 'From The Pyre' • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

One night, we got drunk at Trisha’s and started going ‘It’s not a band - it’s a collective!’” laughs Georgia Davies, cringing in the manner of someone waking up after one too many Martinis, vaguely remembering all of last night’s bright ideas (let’s be honest - you and your best mate probably aren’t funny enough to have your own podcast). “Obviously, we are a band,” she caveats with a smile, as Abigail Morris and Aurora Nishevci grin sheepishly: the last thing they need is for the rumour mill to start a-spinning (again). There is, however, perhaps a grain of truth in Georgia’s anecdote - one which sprung to mind when DIY suggested that, for many, The Last Dinner Party are about much more than just the music.

Having crafted a project which already incorporates high-concept videos, painstakingly-thought-out artwork, theatre-worthy live shows, and runway-ready wardrobes - not to mention an ambitious, dizzying opus of a debut album - the group have now gone one step further, quite literally creating their own semi-mythic realm in which to set their opulent second outing, ‘From The Pyre’. Here, all the world’s a stage in the truest sense.

Today, then, is something of a peek behind the curtain; video calling from outside their London rehearsal space amid a packed promo schedule, lead vocalist Abigail and bassist Georgia are cheerfully apologetic, explaining that keyboardist Aurora is bringing her car over so they can do the interview from inside her five-door runaround. “Our ride’s here!” Georgia exclaims, as they clamber in and prop DIY up on the dashboard, Carpool Karaoke-style. Melodrama still needs its MOT, after all.

It’s an endearingly ad-hoc arrangement for the five-piece (completed by guitarists Lizzie Mayland and Emily Roberts), given that in the past two years, they’ve topped the UK album chart, been shortlisted for - and won - multiple awards (including the 2025 BRIT for Best New Artist), graced television screens on both sides of the Atlantic, and performed in no less than 21 different countries. It’s also an insight into the often less-than-glamorous reality of a touring band - a band who, despite what tabloid misconceptions and social media trolls would have us believe, aren’t exactly on first name terms with a chauffeur.

When their 2023 debut single ‘Nothing Matters’ blew up, and then ‘Prelude…’ ricocheted them into the spotlight proper, people were immediately suspicious about The Last Dinner Party’s seemingly sudden, too-good-to-be-true rise. The internet’s pet phrase, ‘industry plant’, reared its thorny head. Elsewhere, others seized on Abigail’s private school education (a privilege she is quick to acknowledge) as a catch-all reason for the band’s success. Theirs was a sometimes bruising ride which, for a while, put them off giving interviews altogether.

Reflecting on that time now, they’re not defensive, or even defiant. Instead, they seem steadfast in their shoulder-shrugging assertion that they have no regrets about the way things went down. “In terms of a first release, I think it went exceptionally well,” explains Georgia. “We can’t believe what extraordinary luck and privilege it was to have a debut album that became our livelihood. In terms of what ‘Prelude…’ has done for us, it’s phenomenally good.

“We’re so, so proud of the album and everything around it - and for that reason, no, I wouldn’t change a thing,” she continues. “And we learned so much in the process of its release; I don’t think we’d have been able to make an album as good as ‘From The Pyre’ if we hadn’t gone through all the things we did.”

For her part, Abigail admits that “there’s obviously going to be some trepidation going into critical reception or interviews”, but agrees with her bandmate that “we’re feeling stronger as a group - we’re so happy with this album, and it’s been really exciting to start the new cycle”. There may be a slight politician’s air to her answer, but, listening to the record, it’s hard not to agree with her assessment. Creative confidence is never something The Last Dinner Party have lacked, but their second offering well and truly doubles down; uncowed by expectation, it’s simultaneously darker and more playful than its predecessor, heightening each end of the emotional spectrum with unadulterated instrumental heft.

Georgia nods: “It was about pushing ourselves and each other beyond what our defined roles maybe were in album one, and trying new things on our own instruments, and being a bit more collaborative. It was saying: ‘we’re pushing ourselves and each other because we want to do something even better, rather than because it’s important to prove it to anyone else’.”

Moonage Daydream: The Last Dinner Party tell us more about co-curating the new Bowie exhibition at the V&A East Storehouse.

Abigail: My landlord just texted me today saying ‘I didn’t realise you were in a band - I just saw you on ITV talking about David Bowie!’.

Georgia: It was just surreal: obviously, David Bowie is one of the primary influences that we all share, and that we’ve shared since childhood. We got to see not only the cool, showy bits - like his shoes and his costumes and everything - but also these little artefacts documenting his creative process: scraps from his notebooks from when he was designing the stage set, or writing the setlist. All these things that we do and that we put a lot of importance on… it was really amazing to see that reflected in a call from the past.

“ I don’t think we’d have been able to make an album as good as ‘From The Pyre’ if we hadn’t gone through all the things we did. — Georgia Davies

Drawing inspiration from David Bowie and Brian Eno, the band’s ethos became one of lateral, less prescribed writing, using the latter’s Oblique Strategies cards to “just have fun in the studio”. Where the tracks on ‘Prelude…’ normally started life as a piano demo of Abigail’s before getting fleshed out with instrumental building blocks, this time around, says Georgia, was “sort of like Tetris”.

“‘Okay, what if you start this song, or what if you take the lyrics?’,” Aurora illustrates. “I feel like something interesting comes out once you do something out of your habits; [if] you always have a set way of writing, you start to repeat yourself. But because it’s the five of us, there are so many different variations of what we can do.”

She’s not wrong. ‘From The Pyre’ takes us from a Western saloon bar shoot-out (‘This Is The Killer Speaking’) to stormy shores and siren calls (‘Sail Away’; ‘Woman Is A Tree’). Where Georgia wrote the deliciously ‘AM’ opening riff for ‘Count The Ways’, the Sparks-indebted romp of ‘Second Best’ saw Emily take the lyrical reins; while Lizzie, having released a solo EP in the interim, brought a haunting poignance to ‘Rifle’, Aurora’s touch makes ‘I Hold Your Anger’ among the album’s most affecting.

A technicolour patchwork of perspectives, the album is less an overarching narrative and more what Abigail calls “a sort of Canterbury Tales-esque collection of stories” which weave the band’s real world experiences (romantic trysts, life in the spotlight, the pressures of adulthood) into thrilling scenes of triumph and tragedy. It’s an extension of what The Last Dinner Party did with ‘Prelude…’ - namely, the practice of “mythologising [their] own lives” - but here, they’ve taken it one step further, outlining ‘the pyre’ as a realm in which these stories and characters dwell.

Neither kitchen sink nor entirely surreal, it’s a liminal space wherein saints rub shoulders with reality tv stars (“I’m Joan of Arc, I’m dying / Just waiting for your call / I’m watching the Real Housewives / And crawling up the walls”, goes ‘Inferno’), and meta-textuality abounds - for every lofty literary reference, there’s a cheeky acknowledgement of the performance of it all (“Hope my television appearance drives you fucking mad”, taunts ‘This Is The Killer Speaking’).

“ The landscape in which we’ve written this record is very different to the first one, and it’s impossible to not be affected by it. — Abigail Morris

And yet for all the knowing winks and fun flamboyance, there’s also something more weathered to ‘From The Pyre’ - it may be a slightly separate world, but the shadow of this one still seeps through the cracks. “The landscape in which we’ve written this record is very different to the first one,” notes Abigail, “and it’s impossible to not be affected by it. It’s a horrible climate currently, everywhere, and it feels very apocalyptic. When you’re an artist, whatever you write about or make art about is going to reflect what you’re absorbing from the real world. Everything on the record that’s from a darker place will be reflecting our mood, because it’s a hard time to feel happy.”

‘Rifle’ is particularly prescient, informed as it is by what Abigail calls “the conflicts and horror of war, specifically in Palestine.” Written by Lizzie, it’s a Blakean, evocative indictment of state-sanctioned violence and mass indifference. “There’s a place for really strong, direct statements on politics, but that’s never really been what we’ve done,” says Georgia. “So it’s really nice to have a song like ‘Rifle’ on the album - which is so obviously about conflict - that [explores the subject] in a way that still feels artistically aligned with us. I feel like it can be a place, when we perform it live, where people can come and scream and exorcise a rage about the state of the world, and how much despair they have.”

The band are part of an ever-growing movement of artists using their platform to decry the genocide - a position that, as Kneecap, Bob Vylan, and The Mary Wallopers have shown, comes with no little professional risk. “As we have a voice, we feel responsible to say something,” Aurora nods. “But it can get tricky - knowing what to speak to, when, and how. It’s a difficult thing to know where to draw lines in terms of what you affiliate yourself with, because the industry itself is so tangled up with things we don’t agree with…” She smiles slightly, careful not to delve into specifics.

“As artists, maybe two years ago, to talk about Palestine was a really scary thing,” Georgia picks up. “Artists were getting threatened for even just saying onstage that they were pro-Palestine; that open letter was sent [by industry insiders] to Glastonbury about [banning] Kneecap performing. I think a lot of artists were scared, because they were probably getting told behind the scenes: ‘If you are vocally pro-Palestine, you will not go to America, and you’ll get dropped by your label, and your career will get tanked’.

“But the more artists who have spoken up, the more it has become this mass cry for ceasefire, and for help [for Gaza],” she continues. “I think over the past 18 months, the position we have on the Palestinian genocide has become crystal clear, but [we’re] part of a lineage of artists before us who were really bravely speaking up against a lot of pressure and helping other artists follow in their footsteps, [showing] that you can take a creative stance and have integrity, and that not end your career.”

“ Logically, I know that you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a mother. But you do feel that pressure; I feel that pressure. — Aurora Nishevci

Elsewhere, too, there’s a marked maturity that permeates the album - a shift in focus from the religion/sex dichotomy that dominated ‘Prelude…’’s coming-of-age choruses to more existential musings on purpose and the passage of time. “I think a lot of the songs on the first record came from a literally younger place,” Abigail reflects. “I felt closer to the teenage version of myself that was at Catholic school and had a lot of confusing feelings about sex and sexuality that were conflated with Catholicism, so the potency of that religious guilt felt a lot more vivid in my mind.

“As I’ve grown older… it’s still inside me, and it’s still something that I’m drawn to and find artistically interesting, but I think because it’s less present in my sexual life and [my] identity as a woman in my mid to late twenties, it’s not something that I feel compelled to write as much about, because I’m thinking about other ways of expressing it.”

One thing that is - almost invariably - present in the consciousness of a woman in her mid to late twenties, though, is the prospect of what’s next. Whether desired or not, the traditional milestones of marriage and motherhood are culturally ubiquitous and near universally assumed, and the friction between essentialist expectations and personal desires can be complicated, to say the least. In ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Count The Ways’, Abigail sings of “a ring on my finger” and “bells that should ring for me”; ‘I Hold Your Anger’, meanwhile, opens with the statement: “I don’t know if I’d be a good mother”.

“Personally, motherhood is a lot more on my mind than marriage specifically,” she admits. [Thinking about] what you want and what your body can do; what it is to be able to reproduce, and that responsibility; when you know you’re ready, and what’s expected of you; and also the question of how you balance children with a career in the music industry as a woman… It’ll be an interesting decision and moment, if and when we get to that.”

“What about you?” she looks to Aurora, leaning forward between the front seats to smile at her bandmate. Aurora considers: “‘I Hold Your Anger’ is about being preoccupied with what’s expected of a woman, and about [wondering] ‘what kind of woman am I?’ I think there’s something about motherhood that’s always terrified me. My mum had me when [she] was 20, and then my younger sister 10 years later, and then my younger sister another 10 years later, so I saw her pregnant throughout my life. She’s so giving. And I just think ‘I don’t know if I can be that giving, because I’m a little selfish being - I just want to play music’.” They all laugh, nodding. “And logically, I know that’s a myth - that you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a mother. But you do feel that pressure; I feel that pressure.”

Renaissance Women: if The Last Dinner Party’s debut was all about Victoriana eleganza, then what are the key references for Album Two?

Abigail: A big one was the ‘70s mediaeval folk revival. I feel like we’re having a second mediaeval revival in current trends and fashion, which is so cool, but we got drawn to that specifically ‘70s interpretation of the aesthetic. A lot of the artists that we were drawing from - like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles - were a big part of that mystical, folk resurgence. And that was also around the same time a lot of folk horror films [were released], like The Wicker Man. We just found it to be a really fertile source of inspiration.

“ The more you share your grief with people, the less hard it is to deal with on your own. — Abigail Morris

Non-stop frivolity, it ain’t. And, of the album’s three singles, there’s one which has made an especially significant impression; it may sit alongside statement-making, bombastic pop-rock, but ‘The Scythe’’s organ-backed, soaring balladry is what hits hardest here. “It’s a very vulnerable song,” acknowledges Abigail, “but I started writing it when I was 16, so I don’t feel as open wound[ed] with it now. It’s about grief for everything - for death, and for the end of relationships, and the futures that they had.”

In its accompanying video, we follow an older couple as they go about the minutiae of their daily lives - a tender portrayal of love, loss, and unfulfilled potentials. More moving still, though, is the comment section underneath, where hundreds of YouTube users have, without instruction, shared their own deeply personal experiences of grief. At the mention of these comments, Abigail, Aurora, and Georgia all exchange a knowing look, smiling slightly - clearly, it’s something they’ve noticed too.

“Yeah, it was really confronting,” says Abigail. “I read so many comments that were just so specifically about people’s own experiences of loss, and it was really overwhelming and sad and beautiful. I don’t know why I was surprised; I didn’t think about how it would touch people. But obviously something of this nature would.”

“And it’s so nice to see a YouTube comment section that’s not horrible,” adds Georgia (alluding, presumably, to the furore around ‘Prelude…’). “It’s a space - like a message board - where people come and share their own stories. All the comments are like ‘my nan passed away’, or ‘my cat died’, or ‘I was heartbroken’, or ‘I had a three day relationship that ended’… to be compelled to leave a part of yourself behind in the YouTube comment section, I think, is a really beautiful thing.”

“I think it’s very special,” nods Aurora, “because generally, it’s hard to find a space where you can express that - where it’s socially acceptable to talk about something heavy.” “That’s something I feel really proud of,” Abigail rejoins, “because I think as a society, we’re really bad at dealing with grief. I lost my Dad when I was a teenager, and having to tell people and experience people’s [reactions]… they kind of treated me like I was sick.

“No one knows how to handle grief, no one knows how to talk about it. You find yourself telling someone that this happened to you, and then going: ‘But it’s okay! Don’t worry!’. If we as a culture were just better at having public displays of grieving, and not being frightened of it - especially in England, because we’re so English,” she scoffs slightly, “I think that would make the world a better place. So if we can have a comment section where people feel like there’s a space to not be afraid of that, or see it as this ugly taboo thing… It is true - the more you share your grief with people, the less hard it is to deal with on your own.”

This, in essence, gets to the heart of what The Last Dinner Party are all about: giving fans permission to feel things deeply, dramatically, and publicly; treating everyday experiences, from ghosting to grieving, with the gravity of an internationally important event; creating spaces, be them online or in venues, for people to find catharsis and community. Maybe there’s something to be said for The Last Dinner Party collective, after all.