The Last Dinner Party’s Emily Roberts on why she decided to embrace her most “outrageous” guitar impulses on new album From The Pyre
Emily Roberts has just landed in London from an exhausting set at Hungary’s Sziget festival. She is, rightfully so, a little weary after The Last Dinner Party, the band for which she is lead guitarist, led a fiery set under the blazing sun. The crowd was hungry for hits; fervently screaming back most (if not all) the words to songs from their debut album Prelude To Ecstasy. But Roberts has a twinkle in her eye this sunny Tuesday evening, despite her full-on day. There’s some big news to discuss.
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It was during a thunderstorm in Prague last year when an unsuspecting audience heard a piece of The Last Dinner Party’s upcoming sophomore album, From The Pyre, for the first time. The band called themselves the decoy name Yeehaw Interlude for this moment, but the lead single This Is The Killer Speaking had officially been performed. This wasn’t like what happened on the run-up to last year’s debut, when many of the songs on the record had already been played live during the band’s early rise to fame.
This time, The Last Dinner Party were well on their way to becoming a household name, ubiquitously appearing on the radio, on billboards and happily finding themselves atop the charts. So, aside from this one-off performance as Yeehaw Interlude, it means the London five-piece still have no idea how their new songs will be received before releasing them. That’s a new feeling of anticipation they’ve never known.
“We haven’t played about eight out of ten of these songs live before,” says Roberts of the track list on From The Pyre. “With the first record, we always wanted to play the songs live and the recording wasn’t an afterthought, but it came later. At the time, we just wanted to get out and get gigging since it was after lockdown and covid. But with this one, the process is the other way round.”
Roberts, alongside her bandmates Abigail Morris, Lizzie Mayland, Aurora Nischevi and Georgia Davies, is clear on the fact that From The Pyre is not a new era following on from Prelude To Ecstasy. They’re both a collection of abstract, theatrical stories based on personal experiences. But whilst Prelude To Ecstasy was a highly successful test of this format with the songs structured into sections (a prelude, interlude and postlude), From The Pyre ditches any particular order for the tracks and dives deeper into storytelling, telling richer and earthier tales that sound every way from fragile to riotous.
Image: Cal McIntyre
Look Who’s Back
“The start of this record is the opposite to Prelude,” Roberts continues, speaking of opening track Agnus Dei. “Prelude eased into itself and had this dramatic orchestral intro, but it made sense to have Agnus Dei at the start of this one because it just started things off with a bang.” Roberts’ guitar part narrates this track, striking a shiny three-note riff in an effervescent intro backed by crashing cymbals and momentous keys. As Morris slides into her first verse, Roberts drops down into three steady chromatic notes. She climbs them, tumbles back down and then glides beneath Morris’ sultry voice in effortless ease. It’s one way of yelling “look who’s back again” in the breeziest, most nonchalant way you can.
“It’s the most ridiculous song, but not in a negative way,” she laughs. “It’s unapologetic, it’s joyous and it’s silly, but all in a fun way.” Roberts also has a vibrant minute-long solo towards the end of the track – one which took two months to write.
“That solo took a really long time,” she admits. “I was kind of going back and forth. I kept thinking, ‘Is this too silly? Is it too outrageous?’ And because it’s such a long one as well, I realised I’d only ever written short guitar solos. I didn’t know how to write something that long that keeps your attention or tells a story over a length of time. So, that was quite challenging for me, but it was really fun to get to do that because I don’t think a lot of albums coming out in 2025 will have a minute-long solo at the end of a song.”
Roberts took influence from 60s rock for a lot of this record, pulling strands from The Rolling Stones and George Harrison to create a round, sustained sound with a bit of a bite that makes it her own. She used a combination of Music Man St Vincent signature models, a Gibson ES-330 and a Les Paul across the whole album to create a vintage twang throughout, but flavoured by that sharp bite from the St Vincent signatures and their bridge pickups. However, it’s not just her playing that reflects sixties icons – it’s also the way in which she’s written parts of the tracks.
“I definitely took inspiration from George Harrison and the way he writes in the context of a band,” she says. “We all needed to respect each other’s space. Writing my parts was something which was mine, and something I did. I do respect what the writer of the whole song wants but, at the same time, I want to bring my creativity to it as well. I feel quite protective over that. But we’ve just learned to balance those two things.”
Spooky Season
Roberts wrote bits and pieces of the instrumentals throughout From The Pyre, including an eerie, discordant vocal part at the start of Woman Is A Tree. The harmonies are hauntingly beautiful – they start off steady but bend unsettlingly upwards by a semitone. Then, like an elastic band, they snap, and a cold yelp escapes one singer like a gust of air. If you paired it with a horror film (it’s also ghostly a capella) you’d have a hard time sleeping.
“We were very meticulous with writing,” Roberts says. “We didn’t set ourselves many limitations, we just kept adding more layers to things. When I arranged the choir at the beginning of Woman Is A Tree, it was really fun, and it was kind of inspired by the Yellowjackets soundtrack. But I’d probably say it was the most challenging one to sing and to write. We hadn’t really done much of that [choral] stuff before. Lizzie’s usually the only one doing the backing vocal parts, so to have all of us singing in such close harmony was quite experimental and hard for us to do.”
The Last Dinner Party doesn’t choose anything safe or easy – From The Pyre straddles the line between truth and mythos. The record depicts a world where every story is character driven, written from specks of real life and lived experiences.
Image: Rachel Smith
The characters, including scythes, Mother Earth, saints, cowboys, sailors and even Joan of Arc, may be flamboyant theatrical metaphors, but the true origin of each story lurks down at the core. It forced each band member to surrender themselves to the music and allow it to reach intimate parts of their soul. It meant trusting an individual vision and acting on it.
“I’ve been a lot better at conveying my opinions authoritatively, even if they don’t always end up as the result,” says Roberts. “With Prelude, we were still understanding what we’re each good at. I was definitely a lot more shy then, and I’d sit quietly and observe things. But I think it’s always better to say things and contribute. I learned more about writing parts and what works well in which situation, and how to serve the right energy at the right moment.”
Second Best, the third track on the album, is a perfect example of that expert judgement coming into play. The song starts with a magnificent choral passage whose density and power, this time, completely engulfs the listener. For the guitar part, although she mostly used the St Vincent signatures and the Gibson on this album, Roberts chose a Les Paul to create a classic rock sound that she resonated well with on the last album. “I used that for the lead guitar on the chorus specifically,” she explains. “It gave it that rocky sound because the song is a bit more seventies or eighties, so it needed that kind of energy since it’s got that big, sustained sound.”
Sharper Focus
But since Count The Ways needed something sharper with a definite edge, there was an obvious guitar choice. Roberts has known and loved the St Vincent guitars since Prelude to Ecstasy, so why stray elsewhere and fix what ain’t broke? “I’m a bit stuck in my ways at this point,” she laughs. “What I like about the St Vincent is that it really cuts through a mix, and it’s quite high-end. I think that’s a great quality that it has and it just doesn’t sound like a Fender or a Gibson. I wanted something that, when you hear it, it’s not obvious what it is. I wanted people to go, ‘What is that?’ and for it to sound new.”
As a lover of at least one signature guitar, Roberts has had her hopes set on one day releasing her very own signature model. When Guitar.com interviewed her last in 2024, she admitted she’d want it to be “modern-looking” and to “have the same ease for playing as a female”. Has there been any development on the idea since then?
“I’ve always wanted to design or make my own guitar, I just haven’t had any time to do that,” Roberts laughs. “I’d want it to be an amalgamation of different decades in one guitar, even if that’s really difficult to do. It would be cool to have a guitar that combines elements, like if it had different pickups from each other, or a switchable bridge pickup that changes from a P-90 into a humbucker or a Firebird. Having something with a lot of versatility that captures different decades of guitar playing and guitar history would be really cool.”
Image: Rachel Smith
Something unique about being the lead guitarist in a popular rock band is that a lot of fans cover your solos. In fact, if you click on YouTube and search for The Last Dinner Party guitar covers, you’ll find countless clips of people putting their own spin on Roberts’ parts. Perhaps it’s not something she’s quite used to yet.
“It’s such an amazing feeling to watch other guitarists, whom you’ve never met, play something that you wrote just alone in your room,” she smiles. “People covered the Nothing Matters solo and added their own personality to it, which I loved. One guy even added these shreddy licks in between phrases, and I just thought that was crazy.”
The Scythe solo, Roberts says, could be one fans tackle next, or perhaps even sing along to since it’s largely melodic and “hooky”. Or maybe it’ll be the jaunty Inferno chorus which Roberts co-wrote with Morris. That’s the thing about releasing an album whose tracks people mostly haven’t heard yet – the next part is unpredictable.
“I’m just excited to put a lot of the new songs onto our setlist,” Roberts grins. “We can now pick and choose a curated set rather than having to fill an hour. We don’t need to play all of our songs plus a cover to fill the time anymore, so it’s going to be really exciting and freeing to use some of that spontaneity.”
So far, it’s just lead single This Is The Killer Speaking that’s out. It’s a smart hint at what else is to come – starting off snarling and mysterious as it creeps towards a more dynamic, groovy chorus. The thing about From The Pyre is that it packages up tonnes of emotions in one record in a way that’s jaggedly contrasting yet entirely fitting. It’s a giant landscape painting with different characters travelling all over it, in different directions. It’s meant to be loud and busy. But it’s honest, truthful, and another clear masterpiece.
From The Pyre is out now.
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