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Sep 05, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Cal McIntyre

The Last Dinner Party are releasing their second album, From the Pyre, on October 17 on Island. Now they have shared its second single, “The Scythe,” via a music video. Fiona Jane Burgess directed the video. Watch it below.

The band’s Abigail Morris initially wrote “The Scythe” as a teenager dealing with a breakup. Morris had this to say about the song in a press release:

“This song began nine years ago, like a prophecy. I wrote it before I had known anything of grief or heartbreak, how a relationship ending feels exactly the same as that person dying. Once you know how it feels to lose someone you enter a new realm from which you can never return. You’re trying to reach them telepathically through psychics or song lyrics (sometimes those two become the same) and sometimes they give you a reply. It can take nine years to realise you’re even grieving at all but once you do you see them everywhere—in a robin, in a street fox, in a Wim Wenders film. ‘The Scythe’ comes for everyone and you shouldn’t be afraid about what’s on the other side.”

Of the video, Morris adds: “The music video for ‘The Scythe’ is one of our proudest and most intimate. From one angle it’s a celebration of all the relationships that make it so far you both feel like you can live forever, from another it’s the fantasy of imagining what it would look like if your parents had been able to grow old together.”

Previously the band shared From the Pyre’s first single, “This Is the Killer Speaking.” It was 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.

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