Hailing from the the impossibly cool corner of South London’s burgeoning indie music scene, the quintet of twenty-somethings are riding high off the release of their fantastic debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, which they served up on a silver platter at the beginning of the year to immediate acclaim. 

Like a Sunday dinner at Grandma’s, everyone in attendance at the band’s Vancouver debut was dressed to impress. Kicking off their set with the operatic “Burn Alive,” lead singer/frontwoman Abigail Morris had the crowd eating out of her hand as she bellowed out the song with dramatic candour: “There is candle wax melting in my veins, so I keep myself standing in your flames.”

Things were certainly heating up as Morris harnessed the rock and roll fury of Freddie Mercury and the delicate intimacy of Kate Bush to create an on-stage persona that was all her own. And while the band might be green, there’s a very old-soul quality to the kind of show they’ve written and produced — the kind of show that has landed them on a similar path as Wet Leg, which will no doubt also see them shining as a breakout act at the Grammys in 2025.

After building things up, the band proved they could just as easily break it down during the portion of their set that they called the Weeping Hour, where Morris invited the hungry audience to have a good cry along with them as they blended in some of their more emotive slow jams, which strangely packed just as much punch as their rock-forward singles. 

From keyboardist Aurora Nishevci performing a song in her native Albanian language (“Gjuha”), to the crowd pleaser “Sinner,” and a cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game thrown in as a satiating aperitif, the band was firing on all cylinders.

By the end of their set, the Last Dinner Party had everyone chanting enthusiastically for seconds and wasted no time coming back out for their encore to play the single everyone clearly wasn’t going home without; the impossibly catchy and overtly theatrical lead single, “Nothing Matters.”

This might have been the first time the Last Dinner Party rolled their baroque carriage across Canada, but it certainly won’t be their last so grab a seat. 

— Read our interview with the Last Dinner Party —