Music Critic Esme Chen explores the magic behind The Last Dinner Party and their latest album, From the Pyre
From the Pyre is The Last Dinner Party’s second album – and what a triumphant inferno it is. Following the intoxicating haze of Prelude to Ecstasy, From the Pyre continues the band’s signature witchiness: choral splendour, ritualistic rhythms, and a decadent theatricality that fans have come to worship. Their performance on the 27th of November at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall was no exception. Abigail Morris, Emily Roberts, Lizzie Mayland, Georgia Davies, and Aurora Nishevci assembled on stage like decadent saints – mystical witches, baroque heretics – collapsing the boundaries between the sacred and the profane.
… witchcraft in music becomes less about the supernatural and more about spiritual independence
But why, in this cultural moment, is witchcraft rising once more in music? Why do artists like Florence + the Machine, Hozier, and Ethel Cain – artists who weave alt-folk and ritual into their sonic DNA – resonate so powerfully? To fully understand this revival, we must acknowledge why ritualistic, earth-bound music is returning. Its resurgence is a communal cry against sociopolitical pressures – particularly the ongoing assault on women’s rights. In an era of rising violence against women, fraught debates about reproductive rights, and suffocating patriarchal structures, witchcraft in music becomes less about the supernatural and more about spiritual independence: a refusal of institutional religion and a rebellion against the systems built to contain us.
The Last Dinner Party revels in the aesthetics of the “dark feminine” – that sacred collision of gothic romance and ritualistic fury – allowing women to voice their anger with unapologetic lyricism. Rage becomes something both chaotic and exquisite; its beauty, for me, lies in the imagined chorus of generations of women screaming alongside us. What a privilege it is to howl at the very institutions that would have condemned us less than a century ago. This is why witchcraft feels so inherent to contemporary music. From the Pyre is an album shaped like a witch trial – its very title invoking the historical punishment for women who refused to conform. The band draws on the long shadow of “hysteria”, that archaic diagnosis used from the 18th to 20th centuries to pathologise every female emotion: grief, desire, anger, sexuality, silence. The album combats this legacy by rendering female feeling colossal, operatic, and divine.
Their references to female saints…intertwine with hymn-like chorals and grand, ecclesiastical arrangements, elevating women’s emotions to the level of sacred ceremony
The band channels feminine rage into a poetic ritual – blending baroque drama, occult symbolism, female monstrosity, and liturgical resonance to forge a lineage of anger. Catholic and liturgical imagery form the backbone of this symbolism, illuminating how women have been bound to ideals of purity, punishment, and sacrifice. Their references to female saints – so often martyred, mutilated, or sexualised (Saint Agatha comes to mind) – intertwine with hymn-like chorals and grand, ecclesiastical arrangements, elevating women’s emotions to the level of sacred ceremony. Narratively – and spiritually – the listener is suspended between Mary (pure, silent, obedient) and Eve (curious, disobedient, sinful). Through tracks like ‘Rifle’ and ‘Agnus Dei’, the band seems to ask: where do you place yourself in this divine dichotomy?
To reject Christianity is to open the door to paganism, and the album leans into this with feral delight. Their lyrics brim with fire, lunar cycles, bodies as earth, and ritualistic imagery (‘Woman as a Tree’ being the clearest example). Occult symbolism becomes a reclamation of natural power as feminine power – raw, cosmic, bodily. And what sits at the centre of feminine power? The female body itself: a landscape men have tried, time and time again, to diagnose, punish, and control. Historically, the female body has been a site of bafflement and fear to men – yet it remains a powerhouse. The band celebrates this through their embrace of female monstrosity. There is freedom in monstrosity – in women refusing to behave, refusing to shrink, becoming instead something colossal, untameable instead, and profoundly feared. Mythologies of witches, sirens, and demons swirl around these “unruly women”, and The Last Dinner Party revels in this lineage.
… a living, breathing embodiment of feminist rage, textured with martyr imagery and spiritual defiance
Their performance on November 27th was nothing short of volcanic. The setlist mirrored the album’s emotional alchemy – oscillating between tenderness and fury, prayer-like calm and theatrical eruption, romantic longing and destructive impulse. The night became a living, breathing embodiment of feminist rage, textured with martyr imagery and spiritual defiance. Morris, Roberts, Mayland, Davies, and Nishevci appeared in costumes that fused Catholic iconography with aristocratic decadence and Victorian silhouettes – a direct nod to the repression their music seeks to dismantle. The audience – practically a coven in itself – screamed, harmonised, and writhed in unison. It was both magical and cathartic. There is something spellbinding about screaming your lungs out in a predominantly female crowd – an ecstatic rebellion against the structures that attempt to contain us.
With their Victorian gowns, liturgical harmonies, occult flourishes, and blistering rock breakdowns, The Last Dinner Party stand as incomparable, otherworldly, mystical. And I, for one, cannot wait to see what they conjure next.
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