The Last Dinner Party are about to enter their Wicker Man era. Having whipped up an irresistible mix of Kate Bush and Queen with their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, the chart-topping London indie band have now delivered a follow-up, From the Pyre, that channels the uneasy spirit of the classic 1973 folk-horror movie about crazed locals and violent sacrifice. Haunting times, they say, call for haunting music.
“It makes so much sense that folk horror has come back now,” says Abigail Morris, the band’s singer. The UK “is unbelievably f***ed. And there’s no way to look at it other than that there must be malicious paranormal forces coming from the trees.”
The Wicker Man concludes in an orgy of fire and retribution instigated by suspicious natives who believe their homeland should remain ethically and spiritually homogenous. As they look around at an England fighting a running battle with racism, prejudice and the scapegoating of migrants, The Last Dinner Party think the parallels are all too obvious.
This explains the thread of menace running through their new LP – an uncanny quality that begins with cover art featuring such folk-horror tropes as robed figures larking around a bonfire and Morris dressed like a homicidal druid and cradling a lamb.
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The theme continues with the lyrics: 30 seconds into the album’s baroque opening track, Agnus Dei, Morris is watching the world go up in flames. “Oh, here comes the apocalypse, and I can’t get enough of it,” she howls.
“You’re looking for a reason why everything’s falling apart,” she says with a sigh. “And it’s, like, ‘Oh, it’s because we must sacrifice someone to The Wicker Man.’” In other words, when the blame game begins, it’s those without a voice who are inevitably offered up to the gods.
That Morris and her bandmates have time to ponder these weighty issues is impressive given that Prelude to Ecstasy came out a mere 20 months ago – amid levels of excitement and hyperbole rarely seen this side of an Oasis reunion.
The hype was understandable, as The Last Dinner Party had bangers by the drawerful right out of the gate. Fuelled by Morris’s Wagnerian belter of a voice, songs such as My Lady of Mercy and Nothing Matters featured melodies sharper than a box of tacks and choruses that soared higher than a clifftop walk in Dover.
Their look was perfect too. These five friends from university in London wore big billowy dresses, frilly corsets and Midsommar-style flower crowns – think the Met Gala as styled by Tim Burton. You wanted to party with them, even if there was a chance that the weekend would end with The Last Dinner Party tying you to a sacrificial rock and dancing until dawn.
Success came more or less instantly: Prelude to Ecstasy went to number two in Ireland and hit number one in Britain, and the accompanying tour was a sell-out. But it was followed almost as quickly by a backlash that would prove a big influence on their new LP.
The beef against The Last Dinner Party was that, as several of the line-up were privately educated, they must have had a cheat code to the big time. This led to claims that they were “industry plants” – a strange phrase that nobody in the real world uses and was barely even a concept until brandished against The Last Dinner Party.
The complaint that well-to-do musicians have an easier time than those from more ordinary backgrounds is not without merit. That’s true in Britain and also in Ireland, where the business is dominated by the better-off and the working class is often shut out.
But that didn’t excuse the hugely personalised nature of the critiques, especially on social media. People accused the band of getting a leg-up by supporting The Rolling Stones, in Hyde Park in London, in 2022. They were described as Posh Tories cosplaying for women’s rights. “I can’t see posh private school kids as cool, no matter how cool they appear,” went one typical message on X.
The criticisms stung. It was fine not to like their music. But to attack their integrity – to suggest they were, as people, unworthy of their success – was too much, they felt. They noted that middle-class male artists receive nothing like the same vitriol.
“I think it’s a totally disproportionate kind of personal attack that happens to female and non-male artists,” Morris says. “It’s totally unfair. It was very disturbing when it happened. It’s scary to feel your sense of self and your identity is being misunderstood and looked on in bad faith by the public. That’s horrible to feel as an artist.”
The advice was to stay away from social media and not to look at responses to their YouTube videos. But they wanted to engage with their fans – which meant wading through the hate.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Don’t look at the comments.’ You want to interact with the fans. The comments on the video for The Scythe” – the band’s new single – “are lovely. I wouldn’t want to miss all those lovely interactions ... People think they have so much right online, because they’re anonymous, to say the most awful things and gang up‚” says Lizzie Mayland, the band’s guitarist and cosongwriter.
“But I haven’t had anyone say to my face, ‘You don’t deserve to be here,’” she continues. “If I do go down a comment hole and end up being ‘Oh God…’ I can remind myself that those aren’t the people coming to the shows, buying the tickets, buying the albums.
“They’ve literally clicked on a page and are getting on a bandwagon because they want to say something negative because of whatever is going on in their life. It doesn’t feel real to me. But I don’t know, if we got more famous, if that would happen in real life as well.”
Morris nods. “There’s nothing we can do except carry on and know what the truth is and know the people that matter – the people that believe in the truth of us as people and what we believe in and what we stand for,” she says. “All we can do is keep making the art that we want to make. And keep proving we’re not morally bankrupt, f***ed-up people.”
The rush to burn them alive on social media was part of the reason they called their new album From the Pyre. They are, of course, aware that having cruel remarks written about you on YouTube is not the same as actually suffering: they’re not claiming to be an oppressed minority.
They have, however, been singed. That experience has fed into tunes such as Woman Is a Tree (“I can’t feel a thing any more”) and the haunting Sail Away (“a thesis you wrote ... angelic and cruel ... rip us to shreds”).
“I don’t want anyone to think we’re martyrs. ‘Oh, we’re so brave: they’re trying to kill us, but they can’t.’ That’s not the vibe,” Morris says. “But I think the record has more moments that address what it’s like to be in a band and to be experiencing success and a level of fame and what that does to you as a person and what that does to relationships. There is an aspect of the Pyre that is about fame and scrutiny.”
The other influence, the band say, is the feeling that Britain is a country looking for someone to blame for its post-Brexit blues. It hasn’t escaped their attention that folk horror has come roaring back at a time of national self-doubt and crisis. Much as the economically becalmed Britain of the early 1970s produced The Wicker Man, so the 2020s have yielded modern folk-horror classics such as Enys Men, The Witch and now, indeed, From the Pyre.
“If you look at the trends in horror movies from every decade, they reflect a general cultural fear,” Morris says. “The folk horror, especially the specifically English folk horror, it’s so interesting that’s where we go to” as a nation. “It’s a warping and horrifying distortion of our country.”
The villain in The Wicker Man is Christopher Lee’s suave and clubbable Lord Summerisle. With a hardline right-wing government looking more and more plausible in the UK, there are concerns that the movement’s spiritual leader, Nigel Farage, could take on a similar role to Lee’s dapper rabble-rouser – that Farage might be the laughing jester at the end of a parade of merry headbangers. “He could be in The Wicker Man,” Morris says, half-amused and wholly aghast.
Everywhere they look they see the demonisation and scapegoating of minorities. “Suddenly we’re being allowed to be completely hateful towards people, and blame all of our issues on people, who have so much less than we do,” Mayland says. “It’s totally f***ed. It’s sad, scary and it’s having such an impact on people every day. It’s horrible.”
Relatively unusually for a major-label band, The Last Dinner Party have been vocal about Gaza. They were among the acts who refused to play the Victorious Festival in Portsmouth in August when the organisers cut short the previous day’s set by the Dundalk folkies The Mary Wallopers after they unveiled a Palestine flag on stage.
“Taking a Palestinian flag off the stage, that is not somewhere we want to be,” Mayland says. “The Mary Wallopers getting cut off was so foul. It was, ‘That’s not where we should put our music.’ We were sad for the fans who got let down and who couldn’t come see us play. It felt like we could make more of a difference and splash by not playing and making that conversation bigger. It felt like the best decision to make.”
Morris, Mayland and their bandmates are not the second coming of Kneecap, the Derry-Belfast trio who have put the Palestinian cause at the centre of their identity as artists. Still, they have been outspoken about the issue. Has there been any pushback from within the industry similar to that experienced by Kneecap, who were the target of a behind-the-scenes whispering campaign to have them removed from the Glastonbury bill?
“We haven’t experienced it personally,” Morris says. “There have been festivals we’ve done in Europe where we weren’t allowed to have the Palestinian flags. Or to have QR codes raising money for Medical Aid for Palestinians. But we haven’t had anyone from our label or management telling us not to.”
From the Pyre is a fantastic listen: lushly baroque, packed with hooks and brilliantly over the top in places. One moment it sounds like a punk-rock Enya, the next like the art-rockers Sparks soundtracking Saltburn. What it isn’t is a radical departure from Prelude to Ecstasy. Romping workouts such as This Is the Killer Speaking and I Hold Your Anger feel like upgradings of the big, billowy blueprint of their debut rather than something starkly different.
Still, if it doesn’t reinvent their sound, it also doesn’t get bogged down in second-album angst. It is the sound of musicians comfortable in their skin, at ease with what they are doing.
“I feel there’s such a trend and strange precedent at the moment in music where there’s this kind of anxiety, an idea that you need to remarket yourself and rebrand yourself with every single record,” Morris says.
“That’s so counterintuitive to artistic output, because you’re not a brand; you’re not, like, a TV show. I feel that in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s there was a lot more grace given to artists to spend three albums on the same vibe. No one was, like, ‘This is boring.’ You’re an artist. You are naturally evolving. And I think we should be allowed to do that – as more artists should.”
From the Pyre is released by Island Records
