Foto-© Vivien von Glischinski
Die britische Indie-Rock Band The Last Dinner Party ist inzwischen den Meisten ein Begriff. Erst im vergangenen Jahr veröffentlichte die fünfköpfige Band, bestehend aus Abigail Morris, Lizzie Mayland, Emily Roberts, Aurora Nishevci und Georgia Davies, ihr Debüt-Album Prelude to Ecstasy. Darauf auch ihr bekanntester Song Nothing Matters. Nun folgt an diesem Freitag das zweite Album From The Pyre.
Im Vorfeld der Veröffentlichung des ersten Albums spielten die Fünf ihre Songs bereits zwei Jahre lang live – ob in kleinen Pubs, auf dem legendären Glastonbury Festival oder als Voract für die Rolling Stones. Innerhalb von Großbritannien wurden sie schnell zum Geheimtipp. Aber auch weltweit erreichten sie, durch ihren einzigartigen Indie-Rock Sound mit pompösen, barocken und dramatischen Elementen, in sehr kurzer Zeit große Bekanntheit. Ihre Auftritte und ihre visuelle Identität sind dabei nicht weniger einschlägig. Beeinflusst von biblischen, fantastischen und mythischen Einflüssen, erzählen nicht nur die Songtexte, sondern auch ihre Musikvideos durch Storytelling verpackte, aber dennoch persönliche Geschichten.
Das zweite Album knüpft vom Sound dort an, wo der Vorgänger aufgehört hat. Gespeist von neuen Erfahrungen und vor dem Hintergrund zunehmender öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeit, ist diese Ära keine Neuerfindung, sondern vielmehr eine ganz natürliche Weiterentwicklung.
Nach einem erfolgreichen Debüt wächst oft auch die Erwartung an das, was kommt. Wie geht man mit diesem Druck um? Wie eröffnet man das zweite Album angemessen? Darauf haben The Last Dinner Party eine klare Antwort: Man wirft die Zuhörer*innen direkt in die Soundwelt hinein.
Im August haben wir Abigail, Lizzie, Georgia und Aurora auf dem Dockville Festival in Hamburg zum Interview getroffen. Wir hatten Gelegenheit, über das kommende Album zu sprechen und darüber, wie es ist, gemeinsam als Band um die Welt zu reisen. Dabei merkt man schnell, die vier (fünf) sind ein eingeschworenes Team und haben eine unglaublich vertraute Dynamik miteinander. Sätze werden füreinander beendet, es wird viel gelacht.
Your second album is coming out soon! Is there a song that you are particularly excited about for people to hear?
Aurora: The Scythe is coming out very soon. Very excited. We started playing it live as well, and it’s been great.
Georgia: All of them, really.
[they all laugh]
How do you find the balance, telling character-driven stories that still feel personal to you?
Abigail: Good Question. I think for me that’s just how I write, so it doesn’t feel like a conscious thing of: Oh, I need to make this more realistic or this less realistic or do this specific thing. I just make sense of things in my personal life when I’m writing through characters and metaphors and like large allegories for things, and that’s just kind of the style.
You have such a dedicated fanbase. What is it like to see people sing along to songs that you haven’t even released yet?
Georgia: It’s really cool. I think that I’ve never even been that dedicated to a band before, you know. And I’m a massive fan of so many artists, but I’ve never been that dedicated. I haven’t really known unreleased songs of many artists. So, to see fans who know every word to a song we’ve played twice – it’s pretty amazing!
Sounds very surreal! I read that you played the lead single This is the Killer Speaking for the first time during a thunderstorm at a festival in Prague last year. Was that special memory connected to the song a reason why you wanted it to be the first single?
Abigail: Why did we want to release it first?
Aurora: I think from the very first day we played it, the audience reaction was so amazing. By the last chorus, people were singing along, and that was literally the first time anyone outside of the band had heard the song. So, I feel like that was quite a good indicator of “this connects with people”. So, I think that it made sense as the first single and the label agreed, so… [laughs]
Did you approach making this album differently from your debut album? Since you knew that now there was quite a big audience waiting for something, did that impact the process at all?
Abigail: Not really, I feel like the biggest difference, honestly, was that we hadn’t been playing the songs live at all. Apart from The Killer and Second Best. For the first record, we’ve been playing all the songs for about a year, maybe more, before we even tried to record it. So, they were all done and polished, and we knew exactly what they were going to be like. But for most of the songs on this record, they would not finish, and we hadn’t played them live, so that was a different process. Letting it come together in the studio was exciting.
You probably heard about the phrase „second album curse“. Were you ever afraid of it? Did you ever feel a particular pressure to either stick to what you were doing before or do something completely different with this album?
Georgia: I don’t think we felt either of those pressures. There was never a conversation about needing to replicate the first record. In fact, we wanted to just follow what was newly inspiring to us, what we had learned about what we experienced in the last couple of years since we put out the first one. So, I think it wasn’t a conscious thing to replicate or to depart from the first.
Yeah, it actually wasn’t that long ago that you released the first album. When did you even find the time to make the second record? Especially, while you were also touring so much.
Lizzie: We had a few months at the end of last year and beginning of this year, and had been writing stuff in between tours, on tours, in basements. I think we were just so keen to get back in the studio because we, like you said, had been on tour a lot, and so hadn’t really had any time to write. We were all like, “yay, studio time,” and excited to really throw ourselves into it.
Georgia: Yeah, we had like four months in total, writing and recording, which I think people probably didn’t even notice that we were not doing anything.
How did you pick the order for the songs on this album? I remember you talking about how, for the first album, it was very much influenced by the order in which you played the songs live. What was it like for this album?
Abigail: We went through a lot of different configurations of how to start the record, and the first thing that I thought was that it should start with a song that is a tense build-up. Then one day, Lizzie was like, “what if we start with ‘Agnus Dei’?” and we were like, “yeah, that’s actually a really cool way to start a record”.
Lizzie: Especially for album two, what you were saying, there is so much worry around a second album, like “is this as good as the first one?”. So, to come back and be like, fuck yeah, not trying to ease anyone. Instead, being like: here it is!
Abigail: Here it is. Get on board or perish! [laughs]
Your stunning cover artwork immediately caught my attention. There is so much attention to detail with all the little scenes. Maybe I’m just asking the obvious, but each of them corresponds with one of the songs on the album, right?
Abigail: Yes, exactly!
How did you come up with the ideas for each of them? Did you work together with someone to create the visual component of this album?
Georgia: It was all our idea!
Aurora: Yeah, we were brainstorming about characters that could represent each song.
Georgia: And the whole tableau of it, the whole big image, we wanted a medieval tableau sort of thing with contemporary elements. Something where you can really get lost in the little details.
You played so many festivals this year and have been touring as a group for quite a while now. What is the best part of traveling the world together?
Aurora: Lake Tahoe.
[they all laugh]
Abigail: That is the best part.
Georgia: One specific day. Do you want to elaborate on that?
Aurora: [laughs] Oh, you don’t know? It was just a really fun day, we were at a lake, got a speedboat, it was in the middle of tour…
Abigail: …somewhere in America.
Aurora: I don’t think any of us would ever book ourselves to go, but we were there, and it was really special.
You obviously spend so much time together. Are there any funny quirks that you noticed about each other?
Abigail: Emily goes missing a lot.
Georgia: She’s not here today.
Abigail: Exactly! We‘ll often be like, “where is Emily?” and she’ll have quietly gone on a side quest to a garden center. So, we want to put a GoPro on her, just to see what whimsical journey she has gone on.
Georgia: We have our own sort of secret language now, and like layers and layers of inside jokes we don’t even know that we’re making. We can just say one word like “nearby”.
[they all laugh]
Abi: It’s really obnoxious.
Georgia: It’s just layers and layers of jokes like that, that are just like words.
Abigail: Sometimes just noises.
Lizzie: And then we forget that people don’t know.
So, to close with this question: There’s an album coming, do you think there’s possibly a tour coming?
Abigail: Maybe…
Georgia: Yes, one could assume!
[they all laugh]
The Last Dinner Party Tour:
16.02.26 München, Zenith
22.02.26 Berlin, UFO im Velodrom
23.02.26 Köln, Palladium
