The Last Dinner Party

In the organizer's words:

Presented by egoFM and curt

Although it's only been a year since our debut album "Prelude to Ecstasy" was released, we've been playing many of these songs since our first rehearsals in the lazy summer of 2020. "Nothing Matters", our first single, has been a staple in every setlist since our very first performance at the George Tavern in 2021. We've nurtured and cherished those first songs for a long time, and in turn, they've helped us soar to heights and taken us on journeys that were once completely unimaginable. To outsiders it may seem like we rushed into a second album, but for us this was a natural progression. We are not closing a chapter or starting a new "era", but transforming and changing, filled with the experiences and inspirations that the last few years have given us.

It is with great pleasure that we present our new album "From The Pyre" to the world. This record is a collection of stories connected by the concept of the album as a myth. "The Pyre" itself is an allegorical place where these stories originate, a place of violence and destruction, but also of renewal, passion and light. The songs are character-driven yet deeply personal, everyday life events taken to pathological extremes. Ghosting becomes a western dance with a murderer, and heartbreak laughs in the face of the apocalypse. The lyrics conjure up guns, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc and blazing hellfires. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to describe our experiences and give them the emotional weight they deserve. This album feels a little darker, more raw and earthy; set against a sublime landscape rather than an opulent table. It also feels meta-textual and cheeky in places, like a knowing look cast back at ourselves. For the album's artwork, we imagine each song as its own character and each story as part of a wandering medieval mystery play, and ourselves as its performers. This framework of a theatrical production that is both nomadic and fairytale-like seemed like a way for us to visually represent our lives as a band, again mythologizing the everyday.

To mythologize the self is to understand it, and through this period of writing and recording we have gained an even deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. Recorded in London in the spring of 2025 with producer Markus Dravs, these songs were written against the backdrop of our changed lives as musicians. We felt the bizarre omnipresence of our own image on billboards and heard our songs in the duty free area of the airport, but also experienced the intense emotional highs and lows that come with being discussed in public. In particular, "Inferno", "Agnus Dei" and "This is the Killer Speaking" deal in different ways with the various effects our careers have on our individual lives and the people in them. Given this shift from an unknown band to full-time touring musicians, From The Pyre no longer had the same anonymity as our first album, and most of the songs had never been played live before we went into the studio to record them. We played the lead single from From The Pyre, This is The Killer Speaking, to a relatively small audience under an alias (Yeehaw Interlude) during a thunderstorm at a festival in Prague in 2024. Moments later it was already bubbling up on forums and social media with fans trying to transcribe the lyrics, decipher the title and make a connection to other unreleased material.

It was one of those moments that showed us how much things had changed since the early days of the band and what a dedicated community we had built.

Where we used to have years to iterate and refine each song, we now had to manage largely without audience feedback. It was a learning curve to not meticulously plan every second of every part like we had done with Prelude, as the writing was done in short windows of time between tours last year. Although the process was different and challenged us as artists, we are very proud of what we achieved together. We are naturally nervous and excited as the release date approaches, and have certain expectations after our first ascent. Strangely enough, that energy hasn't reached the recording studio and we've only written to excite ourselves, just like we did all those years ago before we ever played a gig. Our mutual admiration as artists and friends has always been our greatest asset and the force that drives us through sunshine and storm.