The Last Dinner Party: the newly-coronated monarchs of baroque-pop

The clothing racks are lined with tunics, velvet waistcoats and corsets. A suitcase lies open on the floor, overflowing with fabric and puff sleeves. Follow the trail far enough through this north London photo studio and it leads to a shoot for The Last Dinner Party, this year’s most talked-about rock band, who are currently holding elaborate poses in front of a stark white backdrop.

With the band close to wrapping up their biggest year yet, and having recently announced their debut album ‘Prelude to Ecstasy’ (due February 2), the room buzzes with energy. Every few minutes, as the five-piece hoist up their petticoats and dash excitedly to the monitor to see their images flash up, the air is cut with the slightly ramshackle energy of a school theatre production.

For The Last Dinner Party, this is a time of beautiful chaos. Comprising Abigail Morris (vocals), Lizzie Mayland (rhythm guitar), Georgia Davies (bass), Aurora Nishevci (keyboards) and Emily Roberts (lead guitar), the band formally introduced themselves to the world in April with bold and fatalistic ‘Nothing Matters.’  One of NME’s Top Five songs of 2023, the single arrived wrapped in a distinctive aesthetic embrace of classical grandeur and glam-rock maximalism.

Almost instantaneously, the band catapulted to meteoric heights at a pace and intensity far beyond any conceivable peers, landing on stages at Glastonbury and The Great Escape within months, before embarking on sold-out headline tours around Europe and the US, all whilst only having released four songs.

Joining NME in the studio today, they are between rehearsals for a tour across the UK and Europe with Hozier, which will take place over the next month. Things right now “can feel a bit like going in a car really fast and not being in charge of the steering wheel”, Morris says. “We’re trying to ignore the words ‘hype’ and ‘buzzy band’ and just focus on what grounds us: playing, writing and rehearsing our music,” says Nishevci. “Jesus take the wheel”, Davies adds, laughing.

Before releasing ‘Nothing Matters’, the band gigged across the UK for more than a year, building their notoriety through word-of-mouth buzz and fanmade videos that spread across social media. With their grungy blend of art-rock and baroque pop, they delighted audiences with their swashbuckling, high-energy stage presence and a commitment to donning Renaissance-period costumes.

“We took our sweet time releasing anything, which was somewhat intentional”, Davies says. “It was about the experience in its entirety, rather than instant recognition from singles.” From the roiling seduction of ‘Feminine Urge’ to the tenderness of ‘Gjuha’ (an Albanian-language call to home sung by Nishevci about not being fluent in her native tongue), The Last Dinner Party show soon became the hottest ticket in town.

“We knew we were different from other bands doing the post-punk thing” – Georgia Davies

Long before these gigs caught the attention of major labels and netted the band a deal with Island Records [FLO, English Teacher], the group knew they were onto something special. “Even with small audiences at the beginning, we were playing with an ambition and a growing confidence that we knew what we wanted to do and were taking it really seriously,” Morris recalls. “It gave us the balls to play everywhere and for whomever, knowing that we were building up to something.”

Roberts continues, laughing: “Our friends and family actually came back after our first few shows, instead of making excuses not to return. That’s when we knew we were good.” By the end of their first year as a band, they had sold out Hackney’s Moth Club and opened for The Rolling Stones at BST Hyde Park 2022 alongside Sam Fender and Courtney Barnett, as well as another emerging act, The Flints. For The Last Dinner Party, becoming sensations on the live scene before releasing music was a fitting retreading of the Stones’ own journey.

“We knew we were different from other bands doing the post-punk thing,” Davies says, before Morris takes over. “We imagined the kind of joyful, exciting act we’d want to see when we go out, and created our own ‘dream band’ from that.”

Gigging is the only way The Last Dinner Party could have come up, an ode to the London live music scene that brought them together in the first place. Meeting as freshers at King’s College London, Mayland, Morris and Davies bonded as they frequented punter venues together, including The Windmill in Brixton. As Morris explains: “We’d be in the smoking area, pissed, talking about how we should start our own band.” Soon enough, they decided to do it for real.

They drafted in Guildhall music students Nishevci and Roberts; throughout our chat, the band affectionately refer to the latter as “master of shred, master of the platform heel, and basically Brian May but better”. Yet The Last Dinner Party almost didn’t happen: Mayland notes that she and Davies hadn’t even exchanged contact details when they first met, and came across each other again by chance at a student party.

This afternoon, the band ground themselves in another force amidst the chaos – each other. Just sitting around in the studio, they are an inexhaustible source of their own entertainment, with comedy bits, meme references and inside jokes flying around each conversation like stray bullets. “This is Georgia, our tall Australian prankster”, Morris grins as she introduces the bassist to NME. And don’t get them started on Mayland’s “scarily accurate” Mark Corrigan impression. “Being in this band is what I imagine it’s like to have siblings,” Morris says, to the tune of a circus theme.

“Our whole mission statement is very theatrical. We love being indulgent” – Abigail Morris

From this whirlwind of big personalities and overlapping voices, it seems inevitable that a visual identity as striking and resplendent as theirs would form. “From the beginning, before we even had one rehearsal, we decided that our visuals would be just as important as the music”, says Morris. “We wanted the whole thing to be an entire spectacle.”

Davies continues: “The glam rock, the historical fashion… It all comes from the ‘magpie’ visual culture we grew up with in the age of Tumblr. You’d be scrolling through this dispassionate list of random shit all the time, just this massive blob of stuff. It would go from Pride & Prejudice to David Bowie to Effie Stonem from Skins, and you could pick up anything that looked interesting.”

The world of The Last Dinner Party – a “nebulous and ever-changing” place where theatrical stylings and ABBA meet The Secret History – manifests in live shows, where fans are free to indulge in their wildest aesthetic desires. Playing a sold out show in LA last month, the band were floored when fans showed up wearing hand-embroidered biker jackets. “It was so obviously ‘Last Dinner Party’, even if it wasn’t the most obvious iteration of our aesthetic”, Davies says. “There’s no set ‘dress code’ at our shows. It’s all about self-expression and community. There’s so much love in the room”, says Mayland.

The hotly-anticipated ‘Prelude to Ecstasy’ is testament to this: a collection that includes road-tested material from their live shows (including ‘Caesar On A TV Screen’ and ‘Beautiful Boy’), as well as new songs – a true culmination of their two-year anniversary as a band. Committed to the classical tradition in which they play, the album even features a musical prelude and a coda, each sprinkled with motifs from their other tracks. “Our whole mission statement is very theatrical,” Morris explains. “We love being intentional and indulgent. I mean, we have a composer! We want to flex that!” she says, gesturing proudly towards Nishevci.

The band’s rapid, explosive success has led to them being the subject of continued online discourse, largely based around false presumptions that they are “industry plants”. They are frustrated by these comments, which seem a cruel and ironic punishment for being so polished and deliberate with everything they’ve done so far. “Do we have to address that?”, Morris asks candidly. She shares with NME that they’re trying to phase out this particular discussion point. Still, they ponder how they want to respond anyway. “We take it as a compliment”, Davies says, wryly, after some thought. “If people think it’s too good to be true, then all we can say is thank you.”

For now, The Last Dinner Party aren’t thinking about the doubters – or even how far they’ve come and how far they’ll go. They’re living minute-to-minute: checking their outfits in the mirror, charging their phones by the wall, huddling together to discuss where they’re going to fit rehearsal time into the next few days. Crucially, they’re making sure to enjoy every second. “No one else in the world knows what it’s like to go through what we’re going through,” Mayland concludes. “This is something that’s so precious to us.”

The Last Dinner Party’s debut record ‘Prelude to Ecstasy’ is out 2 Feb via Island Records

Listen to The Last Dinner Party’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music

Writer: Cordelia Lam
Photography: Phoebe Fox
Label: Island Records
Location: Tileyard

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