When I heard The Last Dinner Party had been awarded the BBC Sound of 2024 Award, my immediate reaction was a booming “for fuck’s sake”. Despite being flagged as the first “guitar” band to win since Haim in 2013, all I could think was “here we go again”. It’s Wet Leg round two.
You or I could count on our fingers the number of shows that The Last Dinner Party had played before they signed with Island Records in 2022. By the time they released their first single in April 2023, they’d supported the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, spent a summer gigging at festivals all over the country, and announced a full UK and EU tour. Since then, they’ve completed another successful summer on the festival circuit, toured the UK and Europe again, announced a North America tour, won multiple awards, and, finally, released an album, Prelude to Ecstasy.
The band has had a trajectory most young artists can only dream of, which began prior to them releasing a single piece of music. In the early days of their success, the words “industry plant” were being thrown around and reviewers questioned how such a small band could afford such a big management team. But now, every word written about them is glowing, and critics compete to prove they were first to champion the group from the very start, conveniently forgetting their earlier hesitations.
The industry is clearly striving for a narrative that TLDP is an underground band that has gone big – darlings of the London alternative circuit that got “discovered”. But to dub them “underground”, implying they earned their fame by working shabby pubs in Dalston, is laughable. In fact, we are listening to one of the biggest manufactured girl groups of the moment.
It’s not a new story: just another example of the BBC, and then the press, adopting a band of beautiful young women – this time ones who produce a cheap version of contemporary alternative music – and shoehorning them to the top of the charts. With Wet Leg, it was post-punk; with TLDP, it’s baroque pop. Claiming they’re “alternative” is just another commercial sleight of hand to immerse us in a manufactured dream in which we fall for the illusion that we’re discovering the next big thing.
TLDP caters to a current craving for whimsy with an edge
Wet Leg made the masses feel as though they were part of the counter-culture that had given rise to the post-punk revival. TLDP caters to a current craving for whimsy with an edge, ethereality that bites.
And it has to be said that the effect of listening to TLDP is one of immersion, in a way. Prelude to Ecstasy is an album aiming to transport us all to a hedonistic feast, a sumptuous, end of the world, caution-to-the-wind fuckfest. Its opening orchestral interlude launches us straight into a tempting fantasy life of excess, glamour and romance.
The escapism feels authentic, given the band members met while coming of age during the covid pandemic. Their music is about pleasure as an antidote to existential panic. In their very first single TLDP told us that they’d “fuck” us “like nothing matters” and the album Burn Alive romanticises the pain and passion of being a young woman in the 2020s. Abigail Morris sings that she wants to make her grief into “a commodity”, viewed like a classical portrait in a gallery. It’s no surprise that in a recent interview with Paper she listed her inspirations as Sofia Coppola, Jane Austen, Rococo fashion and her teen addiction to Tumblr. She describes the band as a product of the internet, “regurgitating” the art they consumed in their formative years. She isn’t wrong.
The band has been universally compared to Kate Bush, but their influences are legion. Their lyrics scream of a writer raised on Sylvia Plath and Donna Tartt, while the instrumentals are derivative of Bowie, Bush and Siouxsie Sioux – though the band strains to reach such heights. The reality is that Prelude to Ecstasy feels like an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to fit a market niche. It’s surely no coincidence they were signed around the time Bush’s Running up that Hill charted number one in 2022, nor that they went mainstream wearing frocks, corsets and ribbons at the precise moment such furbelows were back in fashion.
Even song titles such as The Feminine Urge reference the language of the chronically-online. TDLP write to the experience of Generation Z in a way only someone from our generation could, but their success is in widening their appeal to a multi-generational fanbase. Their music makes listeners feel what it is to be young right now, but in such a way, and with such a sound, that it also makes older generations nostalgic for their youth.
It fascinates me that TDLP are able to do all this while being mediocre. The band stand as further proof that anyone can make it big, no matter how average, if the image sells. Yet it’s inarguably an impressive feat, and I don’t think the band is to blame for letting the music industry, once again, reduce female artists to aesthetics. The only way to turn the tide is for us listeners to be more discerning, by refusing to let ourselves be brainwashed and beguiled. Reject these seductions. Music is more than cultural capital, and female artists have more value than serving as empty vessels so everyone else can feel cool.
Lily Webb is a recent Oxford University English graduate, currently writing and bartending
