The band that gave us the 2023 Song of the Year has announced the 2024 Album of the Year. And they make it seem so easy.
Currently seducing select sold-out cities across our United States (but sadly no flirtation with us here in Boston), The Last Dinner Party have detailed their debut album. It’s called Prelude To Ecstasy, it includes debut stunner “Nothing Matters” (which we’ve been obsessed with since the spring), as well as breakthrough singles “Sinner” and “My Lady of Mercy”. The James Ford produced record hits February 2 on Island Records, and it should continue to elevate the game of the most exciting new band in ages.
We’ve already breathlessly spilled plenty of digital ink on this London art-rock glam comet of a band, so we’ll let them enchant us with the album’s context.
“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,” they declare. “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.”
News of the album arrives with a new single called “On Your Side,” a tender ballad soaked in sweeping grand drama. This is simply a band that cannot miss.
“‘On Your Side’ is a love song with its hands tied,” they add. “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. 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.”
We surrender.