10.

The Last Dinner Party

Prelude to Ecstasy

As debut albums go, they don’t get much more ambitious, or much more confident, than The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy. Delivering on the buzz that grew to fever pitch during 2023, this is an excellent record of theatrical excess. There are echoes of everything from new wave eccentrics like Sparks or Kate Bush, through more recent folk indie weirdos like H. Hawkline or Cate le Bon, and all the way to emo prog whingers My Chemical Romance. Prelude to Ecstasy hits hard with some powerful feminist themes (see, for example, my favourite track on the record, ‘Feminine Urge’, which features lines like ‘Do you feel like a man when I can’t talk back?’), but it’s always dressed up in such flamboyance that it never seems like a sermon. Constantly interesting and unexpected, Prelude to Ecstasy is a record that feels both out of time and timeless. Alongside Chelsea Wolfe’s She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, this record was ubiquitous for me during the first quarter of 2024. Obviously – also like Wolfe’s record – it has waned a bit since. A slightly more consistent follow-up could be a world beater, though. Oh, and I don’t care about the persistent claims that The Last Dinner Party are a manufactured band and ‘inauthentic’. First, because I have no idea how true those claims are, and secondly because it doesn’t really matter anyway: when it comes to music, if it’s good, it’s good; if it feels authentic then it is authentic. And there’s no doubt: Prelude to Ecstasy is good and feels authentic.