The Last Dinner Party Hit Where It Hurts

There's something so beautiful, feminine, and feral about The Last Dinner Party

Whether at the band’s small, intimate performance at Lucinda’s in the East Village or during their enchanting, ritual-like set at this year’s All Things Go festival in New York City, the group performs as if each song is their last. The lyrics feel embodied, as if no emotion is off-limits. It is enough to make you growl and sneer — or fall delicately in love.

The first time PAPER heard the band’s poem of a track “The Scythe,” pressed up against the stage at that aforementioned downtown dive, it felt like a jolt — a stab, the awakening of a numb memory. When the words, “Next time you call, I’ll be your girl/ You’ll be in silk, and I’ll wear my furs/ We can go out, I feel your mouth/ Open me up, butcher my heart/ Please let me die on the street where you live,” hit us, they landed like a pound of cathartic bricks. Awe. Ouch.

We also got to bear witness to their track “This Is the Killer Speaking” before the rest of the world did — on stage, but mostly in our headphones on repeat, smirking along to the devious delivery of cheeky lyrics, laughing to the words “Here comes the killer, here comes your girl!”

When PAPER last sat down with The Last Dinner Party, we talked about what it was like to watch them play their first New York City show in the famed Bowery Ballroom as they twirled on the stage in layered vintage lace we described at the time as “modern, angsty Marie Antoinette (the Sofia Coppola version).” It was fresh off the release of their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, a collection of hits led by their delectable bite of a baroque-pop single, “Nothing Matters.”

Last month, a few weeks before the release of their second album, From the Pyre, we got to catch up with the band again. This time over cocktails in a midtown bar, as Abigail Morris, Lizzie Mayland, Emily Roberts, and Aurora Nishevci (Georgia Davies wasn’t present but was there in spirit) and filled us in on how the album took shape and who they each had to become to make it.Let's talk about your show last night in the East Village. How like the performance for each of you?

Morris: We were really lucky, because that’s something we've only been thinking about after finishing the record. It was really wonderful that when we were writing and working on it, we were just focused on the five of us and what each of us wanted to do and none of our priorities were to do another "Nothing Matters." We were all just so excited to try new things and follow different paths and challenge ourselves. We felt really liberated and not at the whim of outside expectations.

We wanted to challenge ourselves musically.

So what was the priority in the studio? I know it wasn't focusing on external feedback or making replications of the same songs, but what was it?

Nishevi: Letting the songs breathe. Seeing how far we can take them. Not holding back ... not any "It needs to be three minutes long because that's what everyone does," or "We have to think about how to play it live." There is an element of knowing our audience and wanting it to feel good live, but as well, trying to balance that and not letting that stop you from writing something that we might not be able to do ... we won't be able to have a choir and an orchestra, but we're not gonna let that stop us writing obscure, difficult things. We wanted to challenge ourselves musically.

I love that idea of not holding back. Was there a moment in the studio where you found this album coming together? Or did it just come about organically as you went along?

Morris: We went into this record without a final idea. It wasn't a concept record at all, we didn't know what it was about at all. I think it's often the case with artistic projects ... it's why you title songs and paintings most of the time, after you finish them. You have that clarity of what we were talking about the whole time. When you're in the throes of writing and recording each little song is its own separate story, and you're not thinking, What does it mean? Because you're just in the weeds. And then it was only close to finishing the record that we sat down, and we were like, What was that about? And I think it made sense that it operates like an anthology, like Canterbury Tales. Each song is a little story, a vignette, and overall, the album is about storytelling. It's about your personal life as an artist, and how you see the world, how you decide to mythologize people in your life and relationships and feelings that you have, and your way of making sense of the world through allegory and characters.

When you take a real experience and turn it into more of a fictional story does it create space from that experience for you? Or do you become even more tied to it because it's permanent now that it's taken on the form of a song?

Morris: That's such a good question. I feel like it's a bit of both. I feel like it's a way of regaining control of the situation. Because I think for me personally, most of the catalysts for songwriting are troubles of the heart. They're never happy love stories. It's always a heartbreak or a pining. And I feel like when you're heartbroken or when your relationships aren't working the way you want them to, there's a sense that you don't have control over the other person and you never will. You're only responsible for your own feelings and reactions. I think writing a song is a wat to feel like you're in control of the situation. It's like when they say, history was written by the winners ... you're the one in charge of the narrative. Except for me, I only date other musicians, so it's a race! Who can immortalize who first.

We felt really liberated and not at the whim of outside expectations.

Did you have a moment in the studio, a memory when you knew for sure it was your second album?

Nishevi: It felt like we were chiseling away ... like we were chiseling a rock into an album shape. There wasn't a "Eureka!" We had so many songs, we were kind of overwhelmed on what to focus on. But we followed our intuition, our instinct. Then we had to take some songs away.

How did you make that decision? Of which songs made the cut?

Nishevi: It's really difficult.

Mayland: But then it's like ... maybe it'll make another album. Maybe they're meant to be on album three. It's not like it's never going to see the light of day.

Do you remember some of the first tracks you decided to shape the album around?

Nishevi: "Killer" 100%.

Morris: "Second Best" ... "Count The Ways" ... "Scythe." They've been around the longest.

What's this I heard about "Yeehaw Interlude" being another name for "The Killer Is Speaking?"

Morris: We love our fans. Basically ... we started playing it live a while ago. And when we play live shows we give the set lists to fans afterwards. So we didn't want to put the name of the song on the set list. So on the set list we called it "Yeehaw Interlude."

Your fans are great, whenever I look up your lyrics, they're on Genius annotating lyrics. And speaking of lyrics, I heard "The Scythe" last night for the first time. I was outside of my apartment at 3 AM smoking a cigarette and still reeling over the lyrics. It was almost painful, horrifying ... and I loved it. Incredible song. I want to know everything about it.

Morris: This is so lovely because I mean .... the feeling of that song just comes from being drunk and crying many nights for whatever reason. So I'm glad that comes through that kind of like horrifying loneliness, but also bitter sweetness, just really indulging in pain. Lyrically, I wrote the chorus when I was a teenager, and it wasn't really about anything. I'd never been in love I just wrote loads of songs. I started writing when I was a teenager about made-up relationships. So the chorus was just there, and then when my father passed away when I was 17 I was playing that song ... on my own, doing solo stuff playing in bars. And then my sister came to one of the shows when I played that song, and she was like, "I love that song about dad." And I was like, "It's not about dad, it's about a fake relationship. And she was like, "No, but the chorus." I think, when you're grieving, when something is so traumatic and so much and no one teaches you how to breathe, especially at that age, it will come out in different ways. It'll come out in whatever creative output you're doing, or in ways that you don't think about consciously. And I think that's what was happening. Then I kept the chorus, got rid of the rest of the song, and went through a really big breakup. It was the relationship where 'nothing matters.' So this is what happened. And then I wrote the rest of the song about that breakup. And, basically, like death and breakups feel the same to me, my body goes through the same thing.

Emily Roberts: I think "The Scythe" is one of the most interesting ones sonically on the record, possibly because I wanted to approach it differently in terms of technique and not just do what I normally do. I pushed myself. I really like the record by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, Evening Star, and how beautiful and also sad that is at the same time. That felt like the right fit for this song. So I explored using the Ebow in a very cello-like way. And then the arpeggios in the verse were actually done on the Ebow as well. It just really came together musically and lyrically in the best way.

I have to ask ... on your last album, you were criticized a lot, honestly based on how good it was, how clean it was. People thought it was too good to be a debut album so they assumed some industry game was at play. How did you take in that contrast? That positive feedback while also being told your work is too good to be true?

Lizzie Mayland: I dismissed it as sexism quite quickly. Also because we saw it happen to so many other bands of all women. I feel like we didn't necessarily anticipate it, but I wasn't surprised. We did well. And then it was like, "Oh, this group of women possibly have written all these songs themselves! It can't just be that they're good and talented and like to dress up." Personally, I don't feel like we internalized it at all. No one found any skeletons in our closets. It was just not true ... we all met in Uni.

Photography: Nina Westervelt