Prelude to Ecstasy
by The Last Dinner Party
This album has been added to 4 private lists and 12 public lists:
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2024 albums
Jake RipleyTop 3: On your side, Feminine urge, Nothing matters
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2024 Top 20
Adam WoodThere has been little doubt as to my favourite album of 2024 since a day in the first week of February, when I took my AirPods out, having just finished listening to Prelude to Ecstasy three times straight through.
What struck to the core of me on first contact, and which remains as potent ten months later, is this album’s remarkably-assured art pop mixture of 60s baroque and 80s new wave. A little gothic, more than a little dramatic, this is an album equally in love with poetry and bombast. It takes what I loved about Florence + the Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (18th in 2015), mixes in a shot of The Black Parade’s sense of the operatic, and amplifies the result through its unwavering commitment to beautiful melodies, impeccable song structure, and perfectly-judged production aesthetics.
Had you proposed to me at the start of the year something like a mix of The Zombies’ Odyssey and Oracle (1968), Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside (1978) and Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair (1984), I would have been skeptical. As it turns out, that’s close to a recipe for something truly remarkable. PtE is an album from which I dare not attempt to select a favourite track. I can tell you there’s nothing here that rates fewer than five full stars, and that the album’s most subtle magic is in how one song slides into the next, forming in sum a truly special whole.
Not only is Prelude to Ecstasy my most-played album of the year (despite a legitimate effort to take breaks from it so as not to wear it out); five of my top ten most-listened-to songs of the year are from this LP. The Last Dinner Party are my eighth most-listened-to artist, and the only ones in the top 15 with only a single album to their names. I watched their set from Glastonbury at the beginning of summer, and their set at Reading Festival at summer’s end. I think the album’s accompanying 15 minute short film is the most impressive sustained translation of a record into visuals since Beyonce’s masterpiece in support of Lemonade (2016).
Prelude to Ecstasy is in the conversation for my favourite album of the last decade. I wish The Last Dinner Party good luck following up a debut like this.
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Portrait of the Young Women
daniA portrait OF A PORTRAIT? Perfection
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