The Last Dinner Party will release their second album, From the Pyre, on October 17 this year.
The band, which topped the charts with debut album Prelude to Ecstasy, has wasted no time in preparing their second record, which will be released in just a few months. Lead single This Is the Killer Speaking is available to stream now. A statement from The Last Dinner Party confirmed the record is “darker, more raw and more earthy” than Prelude to Ecstasy.
Their statement reads: “This record is a collection of stories, and the concept of album-as-mythos binds them. The Pyre itself is an allegorical place in which these tales originate, a place of violence and destruction but also regeneration, passion and light.
“The songs are character-driven but still deeply personal, a commonplace life event pushed to pathological extremes. Being ghosted becomes a Western dance with a killer, and heartbreak laughs in the face of the apocalypse. Lyrics invoke rifles, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc, and blazing infernos. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to discuss the way our experiences felt, giving each the emotional weight it deserves.
“This record feels a little darker, more raw and more earthy; it takes place looking out at a sublime landscape rather than seated an opulent table. It also feels metatextual and cheeky in places, like a knowing look reflected back at ourselves.” A tracklist for the album can be found below.
- Agnus Dei
- Count The Ways
- Second Best
- This Is The Killer Speaking
- Rifle
- Woman Is A Tree
- Hold Your Anger
- Sail Away
- The Scythe
- Inferno
Grammy Award-winning producer Markus Dravs, who has worked with Wolf Alice, Bjork, and Florence and the Machine, worked on From The Pyre with the band. An announcement of a second album from The Last Dinner Party comes after the release of L. Mayland’s solo EP.
Mayland described the EP, The Slow Fire of Sleep, as “about being in a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life and the fear of losing that. I storyboarded an idea for the video, then I heard Cal wanted to direct it and I was so pleased. He captured the elements which were the most important to me before lending his own aesthetic talents.
“These tracks definitely grew from those periods. Suddenly finding myself in my quiet flat and filling that silence with my guitar and these sad songs. It was a way to process what was happening in my life, to come back to myself.”
In a four-star review of the EP, Cult Following praised the collection of songs as “a chance to come in from the cold and feel for the strengths of folk fundamentals.”
