The Last Dinner Party’s ‘From The Pyre’: All 10 Tracks Ranked

Love and loss are twin pillars of much of the songwriting across From the Pyre, but “Sail Away” pays attention to the space in between: a relationship hitting a rough patch, in need of some reinvigoration. A lullaby-like arrangement floats along, one that sounds like the sonic equivalent of weeping into your pillow. This is proof that the band can be just as deft with the simple and soulful as they are with scorched-earth pop songs.

Throughout their time as a band, The Last Dinner Party have long mythologised the everyday, wrapping up tales of relationships gone awry and growth in roving melodies. Rattling along at high speed through a Western-influenced arrangement, “This Is the Killer Speaking” is packed with layers of guitars, harmonies and percussion, always teetering on the edge of chaos.

This infernally catchy ditty pairs one of the most effervescent arrangements on From the Pyre with the album’s most sorrowful account of romantic hopelessness – an extension of the band’s own pop subversiveness. “Stretch my hand out/ It freezes in the air/ There wasn’t anybody there,” vocalist Abigail Morris sings at one point. As lofty as it all sounds, “Count the Ways” is easy to love, with genuine replay value.

“Second Best” is a concentrated blast of The Last Dinner Party at their most charismatic, both a salute to their heroes Sparks and their own swaggering stamp on the band’s strobing art-pop. Here, unrequited love is presented as something frightening and bombastic; the drums get feverish, while guitarist Emily Roberts’ backing vocals take on animalistic qualities: mewing, screeching, yelping – all creating a feeling of near-breathlessness.

The thrust and surrender of Morris’ voice on this swashbuckling opener mimics the thrill of shedding anxieties – heartbreak, doubt, contending with her position in the public eye – as, lyrically, she scales as a mountain of self-actualisation. With the zeal of a theatre kid, she roars, dialling the drama to 11 in order to seize her moment, commanding space over blasts of brass and a strutting, tastefully overblown guitar line.

As The Last Dinner Party have mastered their distinct brand of musical melodrama, it’s easy to forget that when they pare things back, they can knock you over with a feather. Lean in and listen close to “Woman Is a Tree,” a folk-horror tale that epitomizes the band’s sonic shift towards a grittier, earthier tone than the opulent baroque stylings of their debut. The finished product is quietly obsessed with ideas of paranoia and decay, with an atonal vocal piece that’s striking in its simplicity.

Across From the Pyre, the band shine brightest on slow-burning songs of anguish and painful desperation. “I Hold Your Anger” untangles a series of thematic threads, a hypnotic track that shrinks and swells as keyboardist Aurora Nishevci details a lucid dream – in which an arm is cut off and lost – as well as big, debilitating questions around motherhood. It’s within this wreckage she finds the fortitude to raise her voice.

“Rifle” builds up so serenely, it snaps almost imperceptibly into focus. The band’s urgency binds everything together on this riot of textures and ideas: a bridge sung entirely in French, a swirl of crescendoing guitars and howling operatics, emotional chaos. Betrayal may be the song’s lyrical fuel, but the overarching feeling proves itself to be one of ease, unburdening and independence regained.

When Morris sings “Open me up/ Butcher my heart,” time stops. A sumptuous ballad that evokes the most wistful strains of vintage soul, “The Scythe” displays the frontwoman’s tone in all its husky glory, octaves jumping like a catch in the throat, injecting each line with a potent mix of defiance and regret. A strummed guitar is joined by shimmering drum patterns low in the mix; as effects slowly layer, the track unfurls with the eye-widening feeling of an epiphany coming on.

Now two years removed from its breakthrough moment – and all of the discourse it subsequently became shrouded in – closer “Inferno” reckons with the speed and intensity of The Last Dinner Party’s ascent. Yet there’s an unhurried emotional logic to the track’s structure, mirroring a gradual understanding of the members’ own agency as individuals and that the early narrative surrounding them could be destroyed and rebuilt. Pushing the confessional appeal to a sizzling extreme, this is a bracing, collective display of vulnerability.