Right, so The Last Dinner Party are back with From The Pyre, and “Count The Ways” is doing something properly interesting. Second track on the album. It’s got this immediate, almost predatory energy that doesn’t really let up.
That opening riff is basically nicked from Arctic Monkeys. Not even subtle about it. Bassist Georgia Davies said they were in America listening to Arctic Monkeys and thought, “Oh, it should sound like AM.” So she wrote the intro and the bass line that runs throughout.
Which is either brave or cheeky depending on how you feel about it. But the thing is, they don’t just photocopy the sound.
They take that gritty, prowling thing Arctic Monkeys did and then pile on their own theatrical weirdness until it becomes something else entirely.
The groove is what gets you though. Underneath all the drama and the string arrangements and Abigail Morris going off about snakes and knives, there’s this bass line that just burrows into your skull. It’s hypnotic.
Morris sings about letting the snake bite, letting it crawl under your skin, eat you from within. “It’s alright, the bitterness is growing.” Not exactly subtle.
But there’s something visceral about it that works, like she’s describing an actual physical process rather than just feelings.
Then you get to that refrain and it’s all mutual destruction. “You’ll break into my house / I’ll break into my house.” Tit for tat. “If you twist the knife right / I will twist the knife left.”
It’s juvenile in a way? Like relationship as playground fight. But also it captures something real about how people keep score in toxic situations. Everyone’s retaliating and nobody remembers who started it.
“I can hear strings that should be for me / I can see rings that should be for me.” Wedding strings. Wedding rings. Someone else got the commitment, the future, the whole thing that should’ve been hers.
There’s Catholic guilt all over this album, relationships framed through religious imagery, and here it’s just naked envy dressed up in metaphor.
Morris’s voice does this Kate Bush thing where it’s theatrical without being annoying, which is harder than it sounds.
She’s got the power of Florence Welch in there too, those high notes that Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell does.
Actually, the Wolf Alice comparison is interesting because both bands get accused of being overhyped, which is probably just what happens when you’re young and good and get attention quickly. People get weird about it.
Anyway, when she gets to the chorus, counting the ways she loves someone and the days since she could recall their face, it lands differently than you’d expect.
“The days don’t get easier / The gaps just get bigger / Until I can almost bear thinking of you.” That “almost” is doing all the work. Still not there.
What’s odd is this was an old song. They tried to make it work for their debut album, took it down all these different roads, and everything was a dead end. So they shelved it.
Then came back later and suddenly it clicked. Most bands wouldn’t have that patience, especially a band that went from nobody to BRIT Award winners in about twelve months.
You’d just force it onto the first album to have enough material. But they didn’t, and that says something about how they work. Or maybe they just had enough songs already. Either way.
Lead guitarist Emily Roberts has talked about wanting guitar sounds that make people go “what is that?” rather than immediately clocking the brand.
You can hear that philosophy here. The tones are familiar enough to ground you but just slightly wrong, in a good way. Like someone’s taken rock history and tilted it a few degrees.
The production lets them show off their range properly. It goes from those dark bluesy riffs to full orchestral moments with strings and layered vocals.
Sometimes it’s quiet, almost delicate. Other times it’s loud and defiant. The baritone guitar sawing across the back of the track adds this unsettling texture that you don’t always notice consciously but it’s doing work.
Critics have been split on whether all this precision leaves enough room for chaos. Some reviews reckon that for a band so influenced by glam rock, there’s something too carefully plotted about their approach. Not enough mess.
And fair enough, this isn’t sloppy spontaneous rock and roll. It’s architectural. Everything’s placed deliberately.
Whether that’s a problem probably depends on what you want from your music. Personally, the precision doesn’t bother me because the songs still have emotional weight. But I can see how it might feel a bit sterile to some people.
The track takes you somewhere though. Starts with that prowling aggression, builds through all these violent images, snake bites and knife fights, then pulls into this obsessive counting ritual in the chorus.
Then it does this mad pivot to mortality. “Raise my eyes up to the Lord / I know you’ll come just when I call / I stretch my hand out / It freezes in the air / There wasn’t anybody there.”
That frozen hand is genuinely haunting. Just this specific image of reaching for someone who isn’t there, your hand suspended in empty air.
The second bit of the chorus gets weirder emotionally. “I love the way that I can’t escape the pain / How it hangs from my heart like the letters in your name.”
Which is when the song tips from heartbreak into something more concerning. This is loving the pain because at least it’s tangible, at least it’s something to hold onto.
Like when devotion stops being about the other person and becomes about your own suffering instead.
The influences are all over it. Queen, Bowie, Marina and the Diamonds. Arctic Monkeys obviously. It’s not shade to point that out, the band wears those influences openly.
What’s impressive is they synthesise all these reference points without sounding like they’re doing karaoke night. The baroque pop thing, the theatrical presentation, it comes from somewhere genuine rather than being calculated.
Visually they’re doing something as well. The art and costume work is brutal, cinematically beautiful. They’ve built this whole aesthetic around the sound. Every song feels like a short film.
“Count The Ways” paints these scenes you can actually see in your head. The snake. The knives. That reaching hand freezing mid-air. The empty space where someone should be.
From The Pyre as a whole is darker than their debut. The title comes from Mary Shelley plucking her dead husband’s heart from his funeral pyre, which is peak gothic nonsense but also kind of perfect for what they’re doing.
“Count The Ways” fits right into that world where devotion crosses into obsession, where love survives past the point where it’s healthy or even wanted.
The song doesn’t resolve anything either. Just ends with the gaps getting bigger, the days not getting easier, “until I can almost bear thinking of you.” No closure. Just continuation. Which is probably the right call even if it’s frustrating.
Look, “Count The Ways” is excessive. Too dramatic, too orchestrated, too baroque for plenty of people’s tastes.
It veers between Arctic Monkeys riffs and string sections, between whispered vulnerability and belted intensity. Self-consciously theatrical in a way that could easily become parody if they weren’t careful.
But they commit to it fully. Not embarrassed by the drama. They lean right into it. That spellbinding quality, and the groove is what makes all the baroque flourishes and gothic imagery work instead of just floating off into pretentious nowhere.
The song creates the same feeling it describes. Being unable to escape someone’s pull even when they’re absent. It makes you count along with it, gets under your skin like the snake bite Morris sings about.
The Last Dinner Party made a bet on excess, on drama, on turning heartbreak into gothic theatre. Whether that works for everyone is another question. But on “Count The Ways,” for all its flaws, it works. Maybe even because of them.
