• News

• All

Oct 02, 2025 By Mark Redfern

The Last Dinner Party are releasing their second album, From the Pyre, on October 17 on Island. Now they have shared its third single, “Second Best.” Watch the lyric video below.

The band’s guitarist Emily Roberts wrote the song, which was inspired by Sparks and a press release says is “about the push and pull of being obsessed with someone but knowing that they will ultimately betray you again, and allowing it to happen because you still love them.”

Roberts adds: “I wish I could go back and say to myself that I am worth more than that, and that no one needs to accept being second best. I hope that the song captures the pain, anger and despair I felt but most importantly the defiance and satisfaction I now have in being able to immortalise this person in a song and to look back on the situation with more maturity.”

Previously the band shared From the Pyre’s first single, “This Is the Killer Speaking.” It was one of our Songs of the Week. Then its second single, “The Scythe,” was also one of our Songs of the Week.

From the Pyre is the quick follow-up to the band’s 2024 released debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, which was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2024.

The band collectively had this to say about the new album in a previous press release: “This record is a collection of stories, and the concept of album-as-mythos binds them. ‘The Pyre’ itself is an allegorical place in which these tales originate, a place of violence and destruction but also regeneration, passion and light.

“The songs are character driven but still deeply personal, a commonplace life event pushed to pathological extreme. Being ghosted becomes a Western dance with a killer, and heartbreak laughs into the face of the apocalypse. Lyrics invoke rifles, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc, and blazing infernos. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to discuss the way our experiences felt, giving each the emotional weight it deserves.

“This record feels a little darker, more raw and more earthy; it takes place looking out at a sublime landscape rather than seated an opulent table. It also feels metatextual and cheeky in places, like a knowing look reflected back at ourselves.”

You can read our album review here, and very likely their first interview with an American publication here.

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.