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How Do You Become the U.K.’s Hottest New Band? The Old-Fashioned Way.

One drunken evening in 2019, Abigail Morris and Georgia Davies rushed into a discount store in Brixton, south London, and bought a cheap notepad to write down their band’s manifesto.

At that point, the rock group, then called the Dinner Party, only had three members, and had never actually rehearsed any songs. But Morris and Davies — the singer and bassist — knew exactly how they wanted to look and sound: “Gothic,” “Indulgent” and “Decadence” were at the top of their list.

As the English literature students went from pub to pub, they added to their proclamation, including modest ambitions (playing shows with hip British bands) and more grandiose aims (“We want to be role models for younger girls”).

Later in the evening, Morris accidentally cut herself on a broken glass, and dripped blood onto the notepad. “I was, like, ‘This is perfect!’” Davies recalled in a recent interview. The splatters emphasized the pair’s vision for a band teetering between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Some four years later, this meticulous yet playful approach has helped Davies and Morris achieve some of their goals. Now called the Last Dinner Party, the theatrical rock group — which also includes Emily Roberts (lead guitar), Lizzie Mayland (rhythm guitar) and Aurora Nishevci (keyboards) — has this year become Britain’s buzziest new band.

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