Music
Isis 1997-2010
I feel like I’m always the one to bring up an awesome band breaking up…. and here’s another one! Experimental act Isis is throwing in the towel after 13 years of awesome music. It pains me to see them go but I’d rather a band go out this way than to make a bunch of album that were bad and people would rather have them break up. So with that aside here is the statement from the band:
“Isis has reached an end. It’s hard to try to say it in any delicate way, and it is a truth that is best spoken plainly. This end isn’t something that occurred over night and it hasn’t been brought about by a single cataclysmic fracture in the band. Simply put, Isis has done everything we wanted to do, said everything we wanted to say. In the interest of preserving the love we have of this band, for each other, for the music made and for all the people who have continually supported us, it is time to bring it to a close. We’ve seen too many bands push past the point of a dignified death and we all promised one another early on in the life of the band that we would do our best to ensure Isis would never fall victim to that syndrome. We’ve had a much longer run than we ever expected we would and accomplished a great deal more than we ever imagined possible. We never set any specific goals when the band was founded other than to make the music we wanted to hear and to play (and to stay true to that ideal), so everything else that has come along the long and winding path has been an absolute gift.”
Read past the break for the rest of the statement as well as their video for “20 Minutes/40 Years” and tour dates!
“As with any momentous life-changing decision (which this certainly is for the 5 of us), we feel a very dynamic range of emotions about this and cannot express all of it within the space of a few sentences, and perhaps it’s best to do what we’ve always done in and let our music speak for us. It is and has been the truest expression of who we are as a collective and in some ways who we are as individuals for the 13 years in which we’ve been together. The last and perhaps most important thing we might say in relation to all this is how grateful we are for the people that have supported us over the years. It is a lengthy list that would include those who put out our records, those that played on them and put them to tape, the many bands with whom we shared the stage, all of our family, friends and companions who supported us in our individual lives and thus made it possible for us to continue on in the band, and most importantly those who truly listened to our music whether in recorded form or by coming to out to our shows (or both). It is quite true that we would never have done what we have without those people, that is many of you who are reading this. Our words can never fully express what we feel, but we hope that our music and the efforts made to bring it into being can serve as a more proper expression of gratitude for this life and for everyone in it. Thank you.
“In more immediate and practical terms the tour we are about to embark upon is indeed our last. We are hoping that these final live rituals can help us bring a close to the life of this band in a celebratory and reverent way, and also provide us with a chance to say goodbye to many of those that have supported us over the years. While there is a measure of sadness that comes with the passing of this band, we hope that the final days can be joyous ones during which any and all that wish to come and join us will do so. It seems fitting that the last show of the tour and of our active existence will take place in Montreal, the site of the very first Isis show in 1997 (though that was an unintentional move when booking the show initially). After the tour we also plan to follow through with other projects set in motion some time ago – pursuing the completion of a final EP, compiling live audio and visual material for future releases, and generally doing whatever we can to make our music available for as long as there are people who wish to hear it.”
Isis will be on tour ’til the end of June with legendary hardcore turned indie turned hardcore act Cave In as well as The Melvins (they really don’t need an explanation). I don’t think I need to encourage you anymore than that but if you haven’t gotten a chance to see Isis now is a better time than ever.
5/26 San Diego, CA @ The Casbah w/ Jakob & Tombs
5/29 Eugene, OR @ Wow Hall w/ Jakob & Tombs
5/31 Vancouver, BC @ Rickshaw Theatre w/ Jakob & Tombs
6/1 Seattle, WA @ Neumo’s w/ Jakob & Tombs
6/2 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge w/ Jakob & Tombs
6/4 San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall w/ Jakob & Tombs
6/5 Los Angeles, CA @ The Troubadour w/ Jakob & Tombs
6/12 Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo Festival w/ Clutch, Melvins, Flaming Lips
6/14 Athens, GA @ 40 Watt Club w/ Melvins
6/16 Washington DC @ 9:30 Club w/ Melvins
6/17 Philadelphia, PA @ Theater Of Living Arts (TLA) w/ Melvins
6/18 New York, NY @ Webster Hall w/ Melvins
6/19 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall Of Williamsburg w/ Melvins
6/20 Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club w/ Melvins
6/21 Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club w/ Melvins
6/22 Portland, ME @ Port City Music Hall w/ Cave In
6/23 Montreal, QC @ Club Soda w/ Cave In
Multi-award-winning and unapologetically cinematic UK band The Last Dinner Party have always seemed drawn to the places where opposites collide. Beauty and violence. Grief and ecstasy. The sacred and the grotesque. It’s there in their music, performances, and in the worlds they’ve built around themselves since the band’s earliest days.
Their songs often feel less like traditional rock music and more like myths in motion, unfolding somewhere between a dream, a film, and a fevered memory. Perhaps that’s why horror feels so naturally at home within their creative universe.
For Abigail Morris, the group’s charismatic ringleader, some of horror’s most enduring filmmakers understand that terror becomes more powerful when it exists alongside beauty.
Discussing the work of Dario Argento, she points to films like Suspiria and Phenomena as perfect examples of that tension.
“I think it’s actually the proximity of those things rather than the distance,” Morris explains. “The things that are really beautiful and the things that are really terrifying. It’s like the idea of the sublime. The closer that beauty is to terror, the more beautiful it is and the more terrifying it is rather than the juxtaposition. I think that that’s where the sweet spot of fear and tension and intrigue and pure and real beauty is, where it’s almost the other. And I think that’s what Argento does really well with the sort of the beautiful casting and the sets and the lighting and then the buckets of red blood.”
She cites Argento’s ability to place stunning imagery directly beside the grotesque or unsettling. The vivid colors, dreamlike sets, and beautiful performers suddenly interrupted by buckets of blood, swarms of insects, or moments of genuine nightmare.
“I love how he plays with that,” she says.
That fascination with contradiction extends far beyond horror films. The Last Dinner Party’s work frequently occupies a similar emotional space, where longing can feel catastrophic, and heartbreak transforms into mythology. Morris brings up one of her favorites, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), as another example of horror expressing emotional truths more accurately than realism ever could.
“A divorce is a very human thing that happens,” she says. “And then to turn that into this psychological body, spiritual, eldritch horror is how it must feel to go through a divorce. And it’s more accurate.”
Not surprisingly, news of the upcoming Possession remake sparked a passionate response. “I’m fucking furious,” Morris laughs. While generally skeptical of remakes, she makes an exception for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, praising the filmmaker for creating something entirely his own rather than attempting to recreate Argento’s original.
“He wasn’t trying to capture the energy of Argento’s film. It felt like a story in its own right.” She goes on to explain, “…if they do that with Possession, then I’m interested.”
The conversation also reveals just how deeply cinema has been embedded into The Last Dinner Party from the very beginning. Long before sold-out shows and award nominations, the band envisioned themselves not simply as musicians but as architects of an entire world.
“When we started the band, the visuals were of equal importance to the music,” Morris says. “Before we played a show, before we shot a music video, we decided that what we wanted this band to be was something that was a complete world.”
That commitment led to elaborate mood boards, film references, styling concepts, and even a 72-page presentation that helped define the band’s visual identity before many people had ever heard a note of their music.
For composer, songwriter, and keyboardist Aurora Nishevci, many of those same cinematic instincts have begun finding new outlets. She speaks passionately about the horror scores that continue to inspire her, including the work of Mica Levi and Hildur Guðnadóttir. Rather than relying solely on traditional horror techniques, she is fascinated by artists willing to challenge expectations.
“You can decide to go the traditional route,” Nishevci says. “Or you can completely go another way and still be terrifying.”
That fascination has now become something more personal. Nishevci reveals that she is currently working on her first horror feature as a composer, bringing her own musical language into the genre that has influenced her for years.
The band’s connection to horror has also found an unexpected audience among fans of Yellowjackets. Online, edits pairing The Last Dinner Party’s music with scenes from the series have become increasingly common. At concerts, fans have even begun holding up photos of Jackie during performances of “Woman Is a Tree.”
At first, Morris couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
“I thought it was someone’s grandma,” she says. Only later did she realize the mysterious photographs were actually tributes to one of the show’s most beloved characters. “It’s fucking Jackie from Yellowjackets!”
The band enthusiastically express interest in seeing those worlds collide one day.
While The Last Dinner Party’s future remains unwritten, horror seems destined to remain part of it. Asked what creative paths still excite them, Morris immediately begins dreaming beyond albums and tours.
“We’ll do a horror movie as well.”
Nishevci quickly adds another possibility that has apparently been living on the band’s mood board for some time. “We keep talking about doing a folk horror EP.” “That’s been on the mood board,” Morris confirms.
For a band already obsessed with mythology, ritual, transformation, storytelling, beauty, and terror, both ideas feel less like surprises and more like inevitable next chapters. For much more with Abigail Morris and Aurora Nishevci, including further musings on Argento, Possession, Salò, Hausu, and the future of The Last Dinner Party, check out The Boo Crew Podcast Episode 473 available now on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
The band joins Olivia Rodrigo on the road next year for multiple sold-out residencies in New York and LA. Follow the Last Dinner Party on Instagram.