From The Pyre

About

“We were feeling really energized, confident, and excited,” The Last Dinner Party singer Abigail Morris tells Apple Music, as she thinks about making their not-very-difficult second album, <i>From the Pyre</i>. “There was no pressure from any outside force. It was all coming from u, what was inspiring us and what made us excited in the studio.” After the huge buzz (and BRIT Awards) that followed their debut album, 2024’s <i>Prelude to Ecstasy</i>, the band found the follow-up came surprisingly easily. Combining heavy themes and postmortems on past relationships with imagery involving nature, fire, and farming implement, the five-piece still manage to make their lyrics wry and cheeky. “This Is the Killer Speaking” takes them into murder ballad territory, while “Inferno” finds them watching <i>The Real Housewives</i> as a way of dealing with their meteoric rise. “The record feels simultaneously a lot darker, more seriou, and aware of the state of the world,” says Morri. “Also, I think it’s tongue-in-cheek sometimes and a bit wry, which is the way we approach the world: having that balance of absurdity and deep emotion.” In early 2025, TLDP teamed up with Grammy-winning producer Markus Drav. “We admired so much of his previous work,” says bassist Georgia Davie. “He’s worked with Florence, Wolf Alice, and Björk and we were like, ‘Tick, tick, tick.’ We didn’t have all the songs fully written like we did with the first album. There were seeds of ideas and skeletons of songs that we built up all together as we were going along, which was a different proce. It was really fun as well.” The last step was to name the album, which happened over dinner and sake in Japan. “Having a really evocative title like that is important,” says Morri. “I love the word ‘pyre.’ It’s so medieval. The record’s meant to be a dark <i>The Canterbury Tales</i> [Chaucer’s Middle English pilgrimage collection].” Read on as Morris and Davies take you through <i>From the Pyre</i>, track by track. <b>“Agnus Dei”</b> Abigail Morris: “I wrote this in three parts because I had a crush on someone and was imagining being with them. We actually got together, and then I wrote some of it about that, and when we broke up, I finished it. Lyrically, it’s a nice way to set up the record because a lot of the songs are discussing relationship. It’s about the nature of being a musician and having a romantic life, writing about people you date and how you mythologize the other person and make them immortal by turning them into a character in the song. Sometimes you write about someone you only met once or sometimes it’s a relationship. I think it’s just the way we communicate if you choose to date only musician.” <b>“Count the Ways”</b> Georgia Davies: “This was an old song. We were trying to work on it for the first album, so we had the genesi, but took it down a thousand different road. All of them were dead end. So we revived her for the second album. We were in America and listening to Arctic Monkey, and we were like, ‘Oh, it should sound like <i>AM</i>.’ So I wrote the intro and the bass guitar line that runs throughout the song. It’s very fun to play, and I feel like people will sing along to it. Then it built up, and we added this choir outro with crazy string.” <b>“Second Best”</b> AM: “This came from Emily [Robert, guitarist] because of a relationship that she went through. That was a really interesting song lyrically because Emily started it and she wrote the choruse. Then, she took it to Lizzie [Mayland, guitarist] and Lizzie wrote the intro, and then I wrote the verse. So it was a committee song, which we’ve never done before. Emily was like, ‘This is what the song’s about. Interpret that.’ It’s about feeling inferior and betrayed and frustrated at being let down by someone you love and feeling you’re not their priority. It was a creative writing exercise.” <b>“This Is the Killer Speaking”</b> AM: “I was upset, confused, and angry after being ghosted for the first time, so I decided that the way to process it was to write a character song and make it funny. Originally, I wrote it just for myself as a joke. I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewi, and Nick Cave and thinking, ‘I want to write a song like that.’ I think it was easy to make light of it instead of getting angry because, obviously, I don’t want to murder anyone.” GD: “This was also the song I think that helped us realize the concept of the album. It’s so character driven and we were thinking about how it sat and what connected this cowboy murder ballad to songs like ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Inferno.’ Using the lens of this song helped us to figure out what the whole album was about.” <b>“Rifle”</b> GD: “Lizzie wrote the lyrics for this one, and I think that it’s both metaphorical and quite literal because it’s talking about warmongering in general. Obviously, looking at it now, it’s quite clearly about the genocide in Palestine, but it’s also about how it would feel to know and love someone who went on to wage war and the devastation and anger that would cause to a mother. The whole song is quite angry in the choruse, but I think that clouds over this deep sadness and devastation. When the French section in the middle occur, it feels like a parting of clouds temporarily for this personal address to one another, which is in the two-part harmony.” <b>“Woman Is a Tree”</b> AM: “This was another one that came from a place of wanting to do something specific with a song in the same way that ‘Killer’ was a murder ballad, but I wanted to write a folk song about womanhood, female friendship, and how men factor into your circle. I was drawn to this classic metaphor that a lot of folk stories and myths use, which is conflating women in nature. I feel like there’s such a rich well of imagery to draw on, and I wanted to write something more atmospheric. Not about one specific thing, but more of a mood of relating my perception of femininity to my perception of nature.” <b>“I Hold Your Anger”</b> AM: “Aurora [Nishevci, keyboards] wrote this song late in the proce, and we were like, ‘That has to be on the record.’ We’re all in our mid-to-late-twentie, and this is the time when you start thinking about motherhood, family, and what you want from your life and feel intimidated and frightened. If you want children you have to decide, ‘So do I want to do an album or to have a baby?’ I can’t imagine trying to do both at the same time.” GD: “I think that Aurora saw her own parents make so many sacrifices for her. It’s about the expectation as well as the anxiety of ‘Am I capable of being this selfless to give my entire being to another person? What is the expectation of a mother?’” <b>“Sail Away”</b> AM: “I wrote this with my boyfriend at the time, maybe four years ago. We had the chorus and lyric, and, at that time, it wasn’t about our breakup. Then, I started trying to write the verse lyrics when we were still together and nothing really was sticking. I got custody of the song, so when we broke up, I was able to write the verse. The processing of the breakup was tumultuou, so this is me trying to distill every good thing about the relationship into one song. Even if relationships end badly, it’s nice to be able to recognize the good moment. It’s the same person I wrote ‘Nothing Matters’ about, so it’s like this is the circle on the next record. We were in a car and now we’re on a boat.” <b>“The Scythe”</b> AM: “I wrote the chorus as part of another song when I was a teenager, and it wasn’t really about anything, because at that age I hadn’t been in a relationship. I found it a few years ago and started writing on top of it with more experience of love, then I realized that I was actually writing about grief. The nature of grief is it takes years and years to realize what’s going on and how deeply it’s affected you. My father passed away when I was 17, and now I’m 25 and still figuring out how to talk about that lo. When I was writing a song about a normal breakup, I realized that I was also writing half from the perspective of me and half from the perspective of my mother.” GD: “I think one of the beautiful things as a result of putting the song out is all of our comment sections on Instagram and YouTube become these places where people come to share their own stories of grief and the way that they respond to it, how it makes them feel held and comforted to hear this beautiful perspective on grief.” <b>“Inferno”</b> .

via Apple Music

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