The Last Dinner Party – From The Pyre
Baroque Pop | Indie Rock | Art Rock
79%
the last dinner party
Top Ten Albums of 2024
It’s time for the grand finale of this year’s Listmas celebrations, and as ever we’ve saved the best for last. When we think back on 2024, it will be these records that will be forefront in our minds. These are the records that soundtracked all the ups and downs of the past twelve months. That provided companionship on quiet nights and offered a safe haven when the world got a bit too hectic. So let’s dive right in to the main event: Belwood’s best albums of 2024. Continue reading
Belwood Music Awards 2023
We’re mere hours away now from 2024 – which, as it happens, is the year that Belwood will be celebrating its 10th anniversary! But before we set our sights on celebrations to come, it’s time to bid one last fond farewell to 2023. It has been a truly outstanding twelve months for new music, and it’s been a joy and a privilege to share it with you. Here’s one last look back at some of our highlights of 2023! Continue reading
Top Ten Songs of 2023
We’re halfway through this year’s Listmas, which means it’s time to give our eyes a rest from all the visual splendour and instead provide a feast for the ears as we finally dive into the best music of the past twelve months. The melodies that played on repeat in our heads, the words we kept absentmindedly singing along to each day, the tracks that most engaged, excited and enraptured us. From old favourites to sensational new discoveries, here our our favourite songs of 2023. Continue reading
Live Review: The Last Dinner Party, The Welly Hull, 15th Oct 2023
In some ways I can understand why the term ‘Industry Plant‘ has been thrown around in conversations surrounding The Last Dinner Party. After all, it’s human nature to search for a plausible answer in the face of something that defies explanation. They just seem too good to be true. Releasing an instantly iconic debut single that oozes such effortless charisma, and then exploring new horizons with the tracks that followed while still maintaining that same astonishingly high standard. Their entrancing costume drama aesthetic, the theatricality of their music videos, the wild cathartic revelry of their live performances… hell, even the band’s logo is glorious! I get how someone may listen to their inner cynic before believing that the universe would gift us with a new band who are so assured, engaging and stylish this early into their career. They say seeing is believing, so I felt the need to catch The Last Dinner Party in Hull on their UK tour to see them for myself. Continue reading
Leave It Out!: In Defence of ‘Industry Plants’
The music industry is a bloody mess. From the absurdly broken state of modern charts, to artists’ obscenely miniscule rate of pay for Spotify streams, the modern music industry has a list of glaring issues as long as your arm. But, as human beings are want to do, we can’t help but keep adding new things to the list to complain about. The latest such talking point in music circles being buzzy up-and-coming bands such as Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party being accused of being ‘industry plants’. Though the discourse I’ve seen online has raised some noteworthy points, I think the reductive label these bands have been assigned with ultimately fails to stand up to scrutiny. Continue reading
Top Tracks: The Last Dinner Party – Sinner
There are so many different versions of ‘us’ – the version our friends see, the one we save for colleagues, the facade reserved for strangers in the street etc. – that sometimes it’s hard to know which one is the real thing. Sometimes we create a whole new self without meaning to; we open our minds to new ideas, wantonly dive into new experiences with reckless abandon. A sense of freedom is unleashed like Pandora’s Box, and you’re left unable to be the same quiet naive person you once were. An in a band like The Last Dinner Party, with such a finely attuned aesthetic of theatricality, and at the centre of a vortex of hype and acclaim, there’s the added difficulty of figuring out where the charismatic revelry of your goth rock alter ego fits into the bigger picture. Their new single ‘Sinner’, which fittingly explores a more dark, feral and indulgent sound than their stellar debut, reflects on the desire to reconcile all those disparate facets. Longing to have every version of yourself, no matter how different from each other, loved equally as equally important parts of your identity.
Top Tracks: The Last Dinner Party – Nothing Matters
There is plenty of music out there that could be called “style over substance”, but ‘Nothing Matters’ defies this idea by being so stylish that it takes on substance. The Last Dinner Party’s debut single shows the band’s confidence overflowing yet fully earned and justified, their aesthetic so finely curated and yet worn with such casual and naturalistic charisma, a preposterous conflux of different stylistic elements whose perfect fusion still somehow comes across as effortless. Abigail Morris’ velveteen vocals lending an air of elegance worthy of a Jane Austen adaptation, a command of melody in the verses with the infectious theatricality of an Alan Menken soundtrack. The quirkiness of Kate Bush and the vulgar playfulness of Wet Leg dressed up in an aloof and beguiling gothic exterior, with a grand and soaring guitar solo acting as the perfect capstone for this debut single’s magnetic appeal. With ‘Nothing Matters’ The Last Dinner Party have crafted a track so charming that it collapses in on itself like a black hole to create a point of infinite stylishness whose pull is impossible to resist.
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