The Last Dinner Party Commits Arson

A review of their sophomore album, From the Pyre

19 February 2024. Melkweg Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Concert of The Last Dinner Party

With From the Pyre, The Last Dinner Party trades baroque-pop grandeur for something sharper and more self-aware. The album burns through myth and martyrdom to explore how women’s pain and power intertwine—less an echo of their debut than a rebirth through fire.

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In July, The Last Dinner Party released “This is The Killer Speaking,” the first single from their sophomore album From the Pyre (2025). The song features elements of a Western film score, including electric guitar twangs and a crawling bassline. Its opening verse reads like a dramatized revenge fantasy: “I hope your back is healing from that brutal flaying / And your coat's still stained with me.”

In the accompanying music video, guitarist Lizzie Maryland plays a cowboy pursuing an evasive centaur embodied by vocalist Abigail Morris. The visual is theatrical, a touch surreal, yet nothing new to the band’s devotion to aesthetics. 

The Last Dinner Party rose to prominence when their single, “Nothing Matters,” became a hit upon its release in April 2023. Their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy (2024), topped the UK charts, solidifying their feminist, baroque-pop sound with tracks like “Feminine Urge” and “Portrait of a Dead Girl.”

Visually, the band leans into decadence, often appearing in medieval-inspired corsets and costume-like gowns with a modern witchy flair. It’s a vision that feels both entrancing and defiant, asserting self-expression over the expectations often placed on women-led acts.

From the Pyre was released on October 17th, 2025. The swiftness after its debut could be surprising to fans who discovered the band just a year prior. They should make no mistake: The Last Dinner Party has no desire to echo their debut; instead, the album widens the scope of their world, a place of amalgamated myth to draw from.  

The album cover first appears to be a hodgepodge of things. A sailor and their ship. A chess game. Even a ritualistic gathering of people dancing around a fire. There are swords, a stage, and in the center, Morris in an unassuming blue dress, cradling a sheep. 

Each detailed scene corresponds to a track, showing the vastness of its characters and their abilities. Working together, the project is not as unfocused as it first appears; rather, it explores the possibility and limits of storytelling.

The album opens on the track “Agnus Dei” (meaning “Lamb of God”) where the speaker compares their love affair to a bloody sacrifice: “'Twas on the banks, the Ohio / One kiss and I was disembowelled.” This tension carries into “Count the Ways,” where the speaker and their lover take turns twisting a knife. In “Second Best,” a romantic walk on the beach turns into the speaker saying, “Let us walk by the shore / By the hand, by the hair / I don't care anymore.” 

Violent imagery is nothing new to The Last Dinner Party; the songs hold both a message and a sucker punch to remember them by. More than shock-value, it feels like a reminder that women have historically been treated as symbols of madness, pain, and fetishization. What’s different now is that the Last Dinner Party gets to control the image. Perhaps in this project, it operates as the start of a conversation, with the burning Pyre serving as a release from societal narratives about women.

The track “Rifle” feels like a natural fold in the album’s shape. Although the character-driven violence is present in the first half of the album, the second half takes time to reflect on its merits. While up until then the speaker has relied on violent imagery, even being a self-professed “killer,” the speaker is now repulsed, even asking in the chorus’s confrontation, “Does it feel good / spilling blood?” It’s as if a different, more realized character has taken the helm completely. 

The next few tracks, similar in their reliance to piano-led instrumentals, weave a story of the experiences of womanhood. In “Woman is a Tree,” a character representing Mother Earth reflects on man-made destruction, split into six stale, back-to-back verses. “I Hold Your Anger” and “Sail Away” share similar sentiments of mourning societal pressures, for example, the first stating,

I hold your sorrows, hold your fears

Hold your anger in my tears

Nobody asked me to

But that is what I’m meant to do

In “Sail Away,” a true piano-ballad written by Emily Roberts, the speaker compares being a woman to a “ship inside a bottle,” a barrier that appears invisible until one’s pushed up uncomfortably against it. 

While the album takes the shape of a cycle, with songs wrapping into one another, whether by expansion of an image or critique, “The Scythe” feels like its beating heart. There's an atmospheric draw of synth, a slowing building as the song draws on the circle of life and death itself. While sensitive to frailty, the track’s chorus echoes, “Don't cry, we're bound together / Each life runs its course / I'll see you in the next one.” 

The final track, “Inferno,” closes the burning Pyre.  It’s not a standard, final emotional blow, but a vast space. Like a world collapsing in on itself, “Inferno” embodies the traits of each song it holds: the glam-rock pianos, the undercurrents of darkness. Written by Morris, the song is her personal favorite, sparked by an image of the crucifixion rendered in a sterile, fluorescent gallery she passed on a walk.

“The next day I started writing this song about how it feels to be spiraling upwards and downwards at the same time like an endless coil,” she wrote in an Instagram post, “You can choose which way you want to go and I think that’s a good way to end an album.”