THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “At the turn of the year, The Last Dinner Party were little more than a new name being shared amongst those that had caught them live. Great songs, strong aesthetic.
Having spent much of 2022 writing songs, road-testing them, and then taking them into the studio, it wasn’t until April — when the band released the dark guitar-pop of the signle Nothing Matters — that seemingly everyone had an opinion on them. It was an introduction that took the online world by storm, and yet behind all the excitement and narrative was a fantastically confident indie-rock song by a band doing it the old-fashioned way: Out on the road.
Following a heady performance to a packed crowd at Glastonbury, The Last Dinner Party released Sinner, another gloriously infectious, left-field pop song that fuelled the fully formed zeitgeist and set the band up for a summer that replicated Glastonbury with uncomfortably packed shows at multiple festivals, interspersed with support slots to the likes of Florence & The Machine, Lana Del Rey and First Aid Kit. It was a breakthrough season for one of the most talked-about new British acts in years, delivering on all that early promise emphatically.
Concentrating on their own headline shows, the band skipped confidentally from venue to venue, playing to bigger rooms and on wider stages. Shows sold out and were upgraded. In London alone, the band have moved from sell-out clubs to the 3,000-capacity Roundhouse on the eve of album release. Crucially, it’s not just London where the band finds its early fans, but right across the U.K. and into America too, with shows selling out weeks in advance.
But this is no case of style over substance. The third single, My Lady Of Mercy, an almost gothic, haunting rock song, and the atmospheric and anthemic ballad On Your Side, offer testament to all the buzz and excitement already accumulated. As it should be. Rather than wilt under the spotlight, they’ve arguably become a tighter, stronger unit because of it. That unit features Abigail Morris (vocals), Georgia Davies (bass), Lizzie Mayland (guitar), Aurora Nishevci (keys) and Emily Roberts (lead guitar).
They had this to say about their debut album: “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. This is an archeology of ourselves; you can exhume our collective and individual experiences and influences from within its fabric. We exorcized 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 honor and pride to present this offering to the world, it is everything we are.”
James Ford produced Prelude To Ecstasy, as he did all the band’s previous singles. Not only is he a member of Simian Mobile Disco and The Last Shadow Puppets, but as a producer he has worked with an impressive array of artists, including Depeche Mode, Arctic Monkeys, Jessie Ware, Everything Everything, Gorillaz, Haim, Florence + The Machine, Foals and Pet Shop Boys.
Prelude To Ecstasy is both the closing of that introductory chapter and the opening of the next. The Last Dinner Party? Believe the hype.”
