INTERVIEW: Georgia Davies from The Last Dinner Party, on their hit second album and tour: “We wanted to keep pushing ourselves in authenticity rather than reinvent”
Words: Emma Driver:
Interview: Shalane Connors
Published: 22 December 2025
If your first two albums both reach the top 2 on the UK charts, you know you’re making music that people are dead keen to hear. But in the case of The Last Dinner Party, the BRIT Award-winning UK five-piece, there’s something deeper than chartbusting going on. Authentic and articulate songwriting, a unique live energy, and a commitment to creative evolution fuel these five women and their adventures in rock and art-pop. In late 2025, From the Pyre, their second album, leaped to number 2 on the UK charts, and has been critically acclaimed: both AllMusic (“lusty thespian rock”) and NME (“a record rich in drama and depth”) have it on their best-of-2025 lists.
Formed in London in the late 2010s, just before Covid called a halt to gigs, The Last Dinner Party (originally just called ‘The Dinner Party’) was dreamed up by Abigail Morris (lead vocals), Georgia Davies (bass) and Lizzie Mayland (guitar, vocals), who met at King’s College London. Emily Roberts (lead guitar, mandolin, flute) and Aurora Nishevci (keyboards, vocals) joined soon after; the band play with different touring and recording drummers.
Signed to Island Records, they released their debut single, ‘Nothing Matters’, in 2023, establishing their potent mix of theatrical vocals, earworm hooks and indie-rock energy. They won the BRIT Award for Rising Star in 2023, and announced their debut album Prelude to Ecstasy for 2024. Ahead of the album’s release, announcing The Last Dinner Party’s win of the BBC Sound of 2024 award, Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine didn’t hold back on her praise: “It’s just been so beautiful to see what you’re building,” she told the band. “I just wanted to be here to tell you how proud and excited I am for you.” The band cried and hugged each other, Welch was genuinely moved, and The Last Dinner Party’s place in UK music history was assured.
Prelude to Ecstasy debuted at number 1 on the UK charts – the biggest-selling debut album for almost a decade – and was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. The album is a wild ride, in the best way. Songs about love weave through stories of identity and anger and sorrow, from the excavation of pain on ‘Burn Alive’ (“Let me make my grief a commodity / Do what I can to survive”) to the music-hall, Chappell Roan/Freddie Mercury energy of ‘Sinner’, and the slow pulling apart of how women are forced to respond to men’s controlling desires on ‘The Feminine Urge’.
Second album From the Pyre, as Georgia Davies tells us in the interview below, very deliberately develops the style the band had established, rather than attempting a reinvention or a new “era” that wouldn’t have felt honest. Again, baroque drama struts all over the album. ‘Count the Ways’, for instance, begins with a bluesy edge, then opens out to give Abigail Morris a chance to test every part of her vocal range: from high, almost operatic climbs, to straight-talking spoken-word attitude. You never quite know where a Last Dinner Party song will go until you get there. Will it be orchestral strings (‘Count the Ways’); folk-like darkness (‘Woman is a Tree’); or a gothic tale that morphs into bad-ass country-rock attitude on ‘This is the Killer Speaking’ (“I’m doing time, and I’m down so bad / Hope my television appearance drives you fucking mad” – a true album highlight). You just have to buckle up and trust the songs to teleport you wherever they decide to go. The musicianship of every member of the band is formidable, and the production on the album amps up the emotion but never swamps the band’s performances in the studio. (Producer Markus Dravs has an impressive indie-rock/pop pedigree, having worked with the likes of Coldplay, Björk, Florence + the Machine, and Wolf Alice.)
Currently the band is on tour – after UK dates in late 2025, the From the Pyre tour heads to Australia and New Zealand in January 2026 and stretches over an additional six months of shows, taking in Europe and North America before the band heads back to the UK for summer festivals mid-year. It’s big and ambitious, and a mark of how much The Last Dinner Party are thriving right now. They promise that their live shows will deliver the onstage theatricality that audiences will be hoping for from the album (“The stage is beautiful. The lighting is just on another level,” Georgia Davies tells us, below).
Women In Pop’s Shalane Connors caught up with Georgia in Australia ahead of the tour, to dig a little deeper into From the Pyre and the band’s tour plans.
First of all, congratulations on the release of The Last Dinner Party’s second album From the Pyre. How are you feeling after this massive milestone?
I think once you get your first album out, that’s an incredible feeling, and it feels like a massive cathartic release. But you are still only left with twelve songs to play, and we’d been doing those twelve songs for years, really, even before we released the record. So I think as soon as it was out and we played it a few more times, we were pretty desperate to get some more music out. So now it feels even more like of an accomplishment to have what is developing into a larger body of work – it feels like writing a second novel, or releasing another film or something. And the fact that it’s gone down well has been really exciting, and we’re very proud of it.
With the album charting at number 2 on the UK album charts, you obviously haven’t fallen victim to that old cliché, the “second album syndrome”! Were there any deliberate creative choices you made with his album to mark a difference from the first album?
I don’t think any of it was deliberate at all, actually. The difference from the first album was a very natural progression of songwriting abilities, our musicality and our chemistry together as co-creators, and perhaps the only deliberate choice we made is that it wasn’t going to be a totally separate product from the first album. I think the mentality that every album has to be its own distinct era and its own campaign, and everything has to be a total transformation of your songwriting and yourself, [was something] we weren’t really enthused by, because we just felt like we wanted to keep pushing ourselves in authenticity rather than reinvent. So I think maybe that was the only deliberate choice that we made.
You have said that this album feels a little darker, more raw and more earthy. So going off what you’ve just said, this is just an organic kind of development? Something that just happens between certain collaborators?
I think so. I think both albums are a reflection of the world and the social location in which they were made. The first one was just after we’d finished uni, and I think it’s a much more introspective album about identity and relationships and how you feel about the world as a very-early-twenty-something. And then the second album is a product of people who had been through a transformation and who had been sort of thrust into the public eye, and had been writing through the lens of people who were now being perceived. So I think that From the Pyre reflects a different time in our lives. Also, I think that the things about the world that were occurring at the time subconsciously permeated into the writing of the album … like ‘Rifle’, which is very overtly about global conflict. We realised that we were reflecting on the state of the world and the songwriting retrospectively.
You formed the band during Covid. That’s a unique position to come from. How did you manage that?
It was really hard. We were all friends beforehand – we’ve been friends for maybe three years. We went to uni together, and Abby, Lizzie and I all live together. Studying English literature – totally not music! [laughs]
Aha, this explains why your lyrics are so good …
[laughs] Yeah. And then through Covid, we could rehearse for maybe a day, and then there’d be another lockdown, and then there’d be three months until we could rehearse again. So we were just writing, writing, writing, and I think there was a point where we could go to rehearsal spaces and but gigs weren’t happening. So we rehearsed so much more than we would have done if there had been gigs to go to, gigs to play. We just had to rehearse for a really long time. So by the time we did our first gig, we were so over-rehearsed, really, for a band playing in a pub to four people [laughs].
I’m really interested to know where the band’s influences and inspiration come from. Are there any women you or the band as a collective have aspired to, or someone you feel has kind of paved the way for you as artists?
I mean, so many. We talk about artists like Kate Bush and Björk as women who paved the way for weird women – for strange and unusual women – and who have such a singular style and a distinct musical identity. That’s hugely inspiring for us. And then we talk a lot about Florence + the Machine, who was sort of coming up when we were younger teenagers, who has created her own aesthetic and musical world … When we were dreaming up the band as the sort of thought experiment, we always wanted to combine the aesthetic world with the musical world. And I think she’s someone who’s really carved out a really distinct lane that is like no one else, and that was very, very inspiring to us. She’s someone that we talk to now, who gives us advice and feels like a mentor to us. She put out her first album when she was 23 – so did we – and she signed to the same label, and she [worked] with the same producer, so it felt like she could impart so much wisdom to us. It’s been lovely to have her on our side now, after being a fan of hers for so long,
The music industry has not always been the most welcoming space for women, with pressure to fit into a certain box, and creative choices being examined and criticised in a way that’s rarely directed at male counterparts. What are your observations on gender inequality in the industry, and what shifts do you hope to see in the near future?
For a long time, we sort of existed in this little bubble of the five of us, where we weren’t women, we were just musicians and co-creators, and we didn’t really realise that that was something that people would have a problem with. And then, as we started getting attention, and we got signed, we put out our songs, we realised that people saw a group of “non-men” as an impossibility to create complex and interesting music.
So many other female artists, and ourselves too, get so much criticism thrown at them that they couldn’t possibly have done this on their own. They couldn’t have written the music or the lyrics – there must be a man pulling the strings in the background and writing the lyrics for them, or playing the bass guitar, or whatever. There’s such doubt thrown upon women, even if you can see like that they’ve spent their whole lives dedicated to music. Someone like Chappell Roan – people can accuse her of being an “industry plant”, even though she’s been doing it for ten years.
You can be working your ass off for a decade, and then apparently it “happens overnight” …
Yeah, exactly, and people are like, “Where did you come from?” There’s so much doubt in women’s abilities as musicians and creators and performers. And I also think that people hold women to such a high standard – like the way that women look. If we got up on stage and we were just wearing jeans and a T-shirt, people would say that we looked like sloppy or like we hadn’t put any effort in, whereas I think that male bands can just do that and it looks cool. We always wanted to dress up, but I think there’s a lot more pressure to look good, to sound perfect, but also to be a well-spoken person, and be an ambassador, and be articulate and never say anything wrong, otherwise you just get crucified. There’s pressure put on women that I don’t observe happening to men.
Looking back on the last two years, you had the massive success of your first album, Prelude to Ecstasy, then constant tours, support shows with massive international artists, appearances at mega events and international TV. That’s such an upheaval to your lives. How do you all check in with your mental health and avoid burnout?
Yeah, it’s hard. I think we talk a lot about how grateful we are to be a band as opposed to being solo artists. And I’ve got so much respect for solo artists, because I don’t know how they balance all of the pressure being solely directed at them. We always have four other people who we know are going through the exact same thing all the time. And it makes it so much easier to check in with the next person: “Was that weird?” or “How do you feel right now?” or “Is it okay that I feel absolutely knackered?” So I think that having five people is essential to the operation of the band. Also, learning to set boundaries … learning to say no, learning how to tour in a healthy way, to have time off – and in that time off, to do things that aren’t just sitting in your hotel room on your own.
For a band steeped in mythos and witchy vibes, I’m curious to know if you have any pre- or post-show rituals?
I wish we had something that was more like romantic [laughs] – like “we throw a bit of water into a big cauldron, and we bless the water, and then we wash our faces with it”. We just listen to music. It’s like when you’re a teenager, getting ready for a girls’ night out. We’ll just be in the dressing room. We’ll be listening to music that gets us going. We’ll have a glass of wine, or a margarita. We’ll be doing our makeup, trying on outfits. It’s really fun. And then after the show, we just have a pizza and go to bed!
You’re mid-tour right now, but you’re about to come to Australia and New Zealand. What can audiences expect from your shows? What do you hope that we take away from it?
I feel like we’ve gone from just playing a rock show, where you play one song at a time, and then it’s over, into a really exaggerated, very theatrical performance that transcends rock … almost like going into the theatre to see a production. The stage is beautiful. The lighting is just on another level. I think that we’ve learned so much from seeing other people perform, and also trying to honour the theatricality of the album with a show that is equal parts rock and roll and equal parts sort of opera. We’ve been touring the UK for the past couple of weeks, and every night it just feels like the show got more and more ridiculous! [Laughs] So by the time we get to Sydney, which is my hometown, it will just be out of this world.
The Last Dinner Party’s From the Pyre tour continues in Australia in January 2026. See the band’s tour dates page for details.
Their second album From the Pyre is out now via Island Records. You can buy, download and stream here.
Follow The Last Dinner Party on their website, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok
