Songfacts®:

• A scythe usually belongs in a farmer's hands cutting down wheat or barley, or in the bony grip of the Grim Reaper. For The Last Dinner Party's Abigail Morris, it's a stand-in for heartbreak. This song treats the end of a relationship as something fatal, inevitable, and oddly poetic.
  
  Make it quick, make it quick
  Make it quick so I can't see the scythe in its sheath
  
  By pleading "make it quick," Morris is asking the universe to spare her the slow agony of love lost, or in darker interpretations, to take her or her partner swiftly, so the suffering is over before it begins.
• Written in 2016 while Morris was still a teenager, the track began life as a breakup song before she had actually experienced real grief. She said the song started "like a prophecy," and only later did she fully realize that the end of a relationship can feel the same as losing someone to death.
  
  By the time it appeared on the band's second album, From the Pyre, "The Scythe" had matured along with Morris. "Once you know how it feels to lose someone, you enter a new realm from which you can never return," she explained. "You're trying to reach them telepathically through psychics or song lyrics, sometimes those two become the same. It can take nine years to realize 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."
• Morris' bandmates, along with touring drummer Casper Miles, helped flesh out the track, with production from Markus Dravs, who has worked with Wolf Alice, Florence + The Machine, and Björk. Departing from the band's usual theatrical style, "The Scythe" is a slow-burning, chamber-pop influenced ballad. One part elegy, one part meditation on loss and transformation.
• The music video, directed by Fiona Jane Burgess (who also directed Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful 2022 version" and Wolf Alice's "The Sofa"), takes an unusual turn. Instead of featuring the band, it follows an elderly couple played by Richard Durden (From Paris With Love) and Eileen Nicholas (Trainspotting) on a quiet journey through the English countryside.
  
  Shot on 35mm 4-perf black-and-white film by Mika Altskan, the video avoids conventional drama. As Burgess puts it, the aim was to "see beauty in the ordinary and unspoken," a refreshing antidote to youth-obsessed pop culture.
• Abigail Morris originally thought "The Scythe" was about a teenage breakup until her sister pointed out that the lyrics seemed to be about something much heavier.
  
  "My father passed away when I was a teenager," the Last Dinner Party frontwoman told the BBC, "and that kind of loss takes a long time to get your head around, even when you're in therapy and talking about it."
• Morris chose not to make the lyrics overtly autobiographical, instead leaning into the way grief and heartbreak mirror each other.
  
  "When you have a big heartbreak, in my experience, it's exactly the same bodily response as someone dying," she explained. "Your body doesn't know the difference, and that's really interesting to write about in a song."
• The Last Dinner Party performed "The Scythe" on Later with Jools Holland. Abilgail Morris told Holland the song channels grief in all its forms. "How relationships ending are like death and the grief of real death," she explained. "Things coming to an end, that kind of pain."