The Last Dinner Party share ‘Caesar on a TV Screen’
The band continue their run with another track from their debut album.
Photo: Cal McIntyre
Standing on the cusp of one of the most anticipated releases of 2024 already, we find The Last Dinner Party. From realising their first single merely less than twelve months ago to finding themselves winning the Rising Star Brit Award in December and the BBC Sound of 2024 poll, they’ve been firmly placed on all our radars. Caesar on a TV Screen is the last single release we get before Prelude to Ecstasy — their debut album — will drop.
Caesar on a TV Screen is nothing short of an absolute bohemian delight. Like the rest of The Last Dinner Party’s releases, so far it’s full of that eccentricity and theatrical energy we’ve now come to expect from the band, but with the dial turned up from previous releases. The song starts charmingly enough; alluring and inviting you in with its softer jangle-esque riffs. Don’t be fooled by this, however – this softer start is merely a mirage as some delightful riffs enter the stage, and some warmer life enters.
Just as you think you have your head around this song and what to expect from it, it once again takes you on a left-field turn with its chorus. Now the chorus is something else entirely – as hooks go in songs, it’s perhaps one of the best ones I’ve heard in a long long time. Vocalist Abigail Morris manages to invoke so much energy and emotion, and so too suddenly from what was seemingly a more carefree, relaxed song. After this ecstasy of sound takes place, Caesar on a TV Screen slowly floats back to its slower, calmer tempo once again.
It feels at this point it’s way too much of a cliché to say you can so easily grasp the influences and similarities of institutional British new wave artists such as Kate Bush, David Bowie or Peter Gabriel – a thousand people before me have said it, and I’m sure a thousand people will say the same after. But I think it holds simply because, like those artists, The Last Dinner Party take so much inspiration from novelists and poets from the literary modernist age – they stand on their shoulders and bring those ideas through into their songs so elegantly.
This single continues to build on the already high excitement for Prelude to Ecstasy. Speaking on the topic of their debut album, the band commented: “Ecstasy is a pendulum which swings between the extremes of human emotion, from the ecstasy of passion to the sublimity of pain, and it is this concept which binds our album together. This is an archaeology of ourselves; you can exhume our collective and individual experiences and influences from within its fabric. We exorcised guitars for their solos, laid bare confessions directly from diary pages, and summoned an orchestra to bring our vision to life.” Expect much more of the avant-garde filled with delightful hooks off the back of Caesar on a TV Screen in February.