It’s a cold autumn afternoon when I meet up with the Last Dinner Party. I join the quintet in a round booth at Gemma, on the ground floor of the Bowery Hotel, where there’s a sense of instant kinship—like grabbing lunch with friends visiting from the UK. In between bites of pizza, we discuss their musical origin story, their forthcoming debut album, and how they’ve gone from playing in local London pubs to opening for the likes of Lana Del Rey, the Rolling Stones, and soon Hozier.
Abigail Morris (vocals), Lizzie Mayland (rhythm guitar), Emily Roberts (lead guitar), Georgia Davies (bass), and Aurora Nishevci (keyboard) can’t wait to head off on their first (mini) US tour, through New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—they’re even excited to see yellow taxis and fire escapes, enthusing, “It’s so American!”
“[Being in New York] is most surreal to me, having never been to America and only seen portrayals in films or pictures,” Nishevci tells Vogue. “To be here now touring with our band is very emotional.”
Made up of all female and non-binary-identifying musicians, the Last Dinner Party serves up an intoxicating blend of coquettish, high-femme aesthetics and heavy rock instrumentals. Lead singer Morris is a powerhouse, wielding a voice that evokes both Freddie Mercury and Florence Welch.
“When we first started talking about wanting to start a band, it was only because we wanted to play these small venues in London,” Davies says. “Our first gig was at the George Cabin in East London. We were extremely nervous—there were probably only about 15 people there, and all of them were close friends of the other bands playing that night.”
It s a point of pride for Davies and her fellow bandmates that their friends in attendance at the Last Dinner Party s inaugural gig expressed a sense of pleasant surprise by the band s musical prowess. “From the beginning, there was no question that we wanted to form a band and prioritize live performance,” says Morris. “We had been watching other bands before lockdown where the only time [you could] see them was live and in person—and that creates such a sense of community and being present that you can’t get online. I think it’s kind of an old-fashioned way to do it.”
With their formidable talent and polished technique, the group has sparked baseless online rumors that they’re an industry plant, masquerading as indie newcomers. The truth is that the five friends met at university, where they used their various academic backgrounds (both Davies and Morris studied English literature, while Mayland studied art history) to create mood boards for their fledging outfit, and had long conversations in the smoking section of East London pubs.
“The visual world we create is so important to our music because the music will evolve constantly over time,” Morris says. “The visual world was one of the first things we dreamed up, even before rehearsal. We all sat down to decide what we wanted to be called, what imagery it evokes, and what world we want to build aesthetically.” While they’ve taken sonic inspiration from the likes of David Bowie, Grace Jones, Weyes Blood, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams, they’ve looked to Chloë Sevigny, Vivienne Westwood, Catholic iconography, and their favorite films (we all share a fondness for Anna Biller’s The Love Witch) for style cues.
“The important thing between the five of us is that we want to create music that continually challenges and interests us. We don’t want to get pigeonholed into one genre or one look,” Morris continues. “With [our upcoming record], we want to establish from the beginning to expect a lot of variation and change rather than, you know, being in corsets forever.”
In the four short years since they formed, the Last Dinner Party has booked some impressive supporting slots, including opening for the Rolling Stones in London’s Hyde Park last year. “Before that, we did a gig in Brighton to like 150,” Roberts says with a laugh. On the afternoon their manager FaceTimed with the news about the Stones gig, the group bursted into a fit of joyful screams from the control room of a studio in North London.
Though their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, isn’t out until February, fans who see the Last Dinner Party on tour won’t have to wait quite that long to hear the new material. “We approached making the album by playing live as much as possible before we committed to anything in the recording studio,” says Davies. “The new songs we’ve added to our set recently will still evolve. We’re using our gigs as a way of shopping and refining the parts of our songs.”
It’s a helpful, functional process that also sends their audiences a message. “We will play stuff that’s not perfectly finished or polished, and it’ll change,” says Mayland. “We’ll do different set lists and arrangements of the songs to set the standard of constant evolution.”
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The evening after our Lower East Side lunch date, the band plays their first sold-out New York City show at the Bowery Ballroom, where their orchestral entrance music is met with the screams of ecstatic fans. Their wardrobe is made up of sheer, silver body-con silhouettes, Marc Jacobs Kiki ankle boots, and puff-sleeved linen dresses that could have come straight from Marie Antoinette’s closet. Davies has a long white ribbon hanging from her bass guitar’s tuning pegs, while Morris has a matching bow tied around her mic stand as she purrs to a cheering crowd, “This next song is about feminine rage.” (Speaking of: Don’t mistake their female gaze aesthetics for immaturity. “We still get referred to as girls. It’s quite infantilizing and patronizing in some ways,” Roberts tell me. “We’re not girls anymore, we’re in our 20s.”) In between ethereal melodies and hard-rock interludes, Morris invites fans to sing along to one of the band’s unreleased songs, “Portrait of a Dead Girl,” and to pick up their own pair of white knee-high ruffle socks, embroidered with the band’s cherub logo. (I can’t resist this call myself, making a beeline to the merch stand.) During their final and perhaps best-known song, “Nothing Matters,” Morris sings while effortlessly jumping off the stage and into the crowd below.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Morris, Mayland, Roberts, Davies, and Nishevci were all in a pit themselves, cheering on their own favorite acts. “The first show that we played on our UK tour was in Glasgow, and there were people lining up in the cold from like midday,” Davies says. “When we got out on stage, seeing the adoration in their eyes, and the way that they were looking at us—it’s like how I looked at like people that I admired when I used to go to their shows.”
