SOFT CELL ANNOUNCE DANCETERIA ALBUM
The new album from Soft Cell, Danceteria, is due for release this September. Billed as the final album from the band, it’s described as a tribute to the late, great Dave Ball. A new video for the title single is also now out.
Discussing the album, Marc Almond provides insight into the title track’s inspiration. “’Danceteria’ is a love letter to New York in the early 80s. The time we spent in New York – where we recorded our first 3 albums – shaped us both as artists and people. To celebrate this period is a fitting farewell to Dave Ball and the final Soft Cell studio album.”
In the press release for the album, Adrian Thrills captured the themes and ideas that inspired the new songs: ‘Danceteria’ is set in the legendary Manhattan nightclub where young Marc and Dave would party until the small hours after the recording sessions for their seminal 1981 debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. This was a life changing moment for the two art school students from Leeds Polytechnic: Marc and Dave stepped into a world of unbridled creativity and total self-expression in New York, swiftly fitting in and making friends with the most up for it in-crowd at Danceteria. The venue provided a home for party people from all walks of life, sexualities and recreational appetites, drawn together by the desire to simply be themselves.
Marc saw Madonna’s first ever performance on the Danceteria floor. During that time, Marc and Dave also met Andy Warhol a few times (which inspired the track ‘Polaroid’ on Soft Cell’s fifth studio album, 2022’s *Happiness not included). The duo recorded their second album 1982’s The Art of Falling Apart and the majority of third album 1984’s This Last Night In Sodom in the Big Apple, working with engineer and producer Mike Thorne at Mediasound for the first two and Dave Ball producing the third.
“Soft Cell have always had a strong connection with New York, and my Soft Cell lyrics often look at America through British eyes,” says Marc. “New York in the 1980s was a particularly creative place for me. It was a pivotal era in terms of changes in my personal life and changes in the city itself. New York shaped Soft Cell, as it opened up a whole new world of possibilities. It was dirty, dark and dangerous – a real Wild West – but it was also deeply inspiring and exciting. A lot of our original influences came from America anyway: New York punk, Devo, Suicide, Lou Reed, disco and 1960s soul. But New York was like nowhere else on earth. There were 24-hour nightclubs, music, art and underground theatre. It offered a cornucopia of energy and edge, and the lyrics on ‘Danceteria’ reflect that time of my life.”
This summer, Marc Almond will be performing as Soft Cell in North America on the Generations Tour with The Human League and Alison Moyet throughout June to July. The tour started on the 2nd June in San Diego, USA and winds up in Niagara, Canada on the 2nd July (get tickets here). Marc will also be playing some UK solo shows, including with Gary Numan and Ladytron at Crystal Palace Bowl, London, on the 6th August and as a special guest of The Human League at Ludlow Castle, Shopshire, on the 18th July (full listings and tickets here).
Danceteria is equally a tribute to the late, great Dave Ball. The final album is one of the last bodies of work Ball co-wrote and produced before his sad, untimely passing on the 22nd of October 2025. Almond led the obituaries, describing Dave as a “brilliant musical genius”. The world’s media followed, hailing him as an electronic music pioneer, plus music stars including Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys, Mute Records’ Daniel Miller, Cabaret Voltaire and Richard Norris from Dave’s techno duo The Grid contributing an outpouring of elegiac praise. Dave finished ‘Danceteria’ two days before he passed away and it is in full tribute to him that the album release went ahead as planned.
It is also because of Dave’s passing that Danceteria simply has to be the last Soft Cell album, as Marc explains: “There can be no more recordings of Soft Cell without Dave, it would not be possible. The sad reality is that Dave Ball was half of Soft Cell, and live work aside, I can’t write Soft Cell songs without him.”
With Dave Ball’s untimely passing in October 2025, aged 66, the new album is a testimony to his arranging skills and innovative production talent. The album’s final mixes were completed just two days before his death, and only two months after his last live appearance with Soft Cell, when the band headlined the Rewind Festival in Henley-On-Thames in front of over 20,000 fans.
“Dave was a wonderfully brilliant musical genius,” says Marc. “And I take some solace from the fact that he heard the finished record before he died. He knew it was a great piece of work, and the tunes and hooks are unmistakably Soft Cell. The moment I received the music files from him, it was immediately clear that these songs were among the best he’d ever made. I was stoked and excited, and that helped with my lyrics. When we played Rewind, we talked backstage about how excited we were about this record. Our previous album, *Happiness not included, was made during the pandemic. I had Covid quite badly, and it affected my voice and breathing. Dave and I could only communicate with each other through emails and texts. We were more connected on this one.”
Once Marc had received the instrumental music from Dave’s South London studio, he wrote lyrics and decamped to Dean Street Studios in Soho for some “very vibey” recording sessions with his vocal engineer Jonny Solway and regular backing vocalists Louise Marshall, Bryan Chambers and Simon King. Another key contributor was Soft Cell’s touring keyboardist Philip Larsen. A Grammy-winning mixer who co-produced the band’s previous album four years ago, Larsen worked with Dave and Marc as the new record neared completion, again co-producing with Soft Cell.
‘Danceteria’ is bookended by two floor-filling pop bangers – the title track and ‘Out Come the Freaks’. Following on from the spoken words and smoky, ambient electronics of ‘Elusive’, the title track is a big, euphoric dance number that reflects the hedonistic spirit of the Manhattan clubs where fabulous fashionistas rubbed shoulders with scene-setters. The album finishes with a joyous, righteous cover of ‘Out Come The Freaks’, a mutant disco classic originally released in 1981 by the influential Detroit funk-rock band Was (Not Was). Soft Cell’s cover, with Dave on vocals, also features a superb cameo from Nona Hendryx, once of Labelle and another former Danceteria regular.
Says Marc: “Cover versions have always been part and parcel of Soft Cell, and I wanted this record to contain echoes of our debut album. ‘Out Come The Freaks’ was a single on ZE, and I used to play it when I DJed in the 80s. I’d also wanted to do something with Nona for a very long time. She’s a good friend, but we’d never found the right song – until now. We had finished making ‘Out Come The Freaks’, so I sent it to her with a message saying that she could do anything she wanted on it. She took her backing singers into a studio and just sang, adding her own improvisations. She sounds absolutely fantastic.”
There are further up-tempo moments in ‘Wave To America’ – a star-spangled account of the United States reimagined as a kaleidoscopic journey through iconic images – and ‘In Heaven (When I Dance With You)’, an unashamed homage to northern soul, one of Dave’s key influences. The latter is an original song, but it stands solidly in the tradition of Soft Cell’s classic soul covers, from their celebrated take on Ed Cobb’s ‘Tainted Love’ (the UK’s biggest-selling single of 1981) to 1982’s ‘What!’ (originally by Judy Street) and 2002’s ‘The Night’ (a hit for Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons).
In time-honoured Soft Cell style, the bangers sit alongside moodier ballads and more reflective moments. On ‘The Space Inside’, we are transported to the leather bars and transgender sex clubs of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where the city’s night owls find themselves “searching for redemption in the night’s decay”. ‘Times Square’ is a mischievous account of an afternoon hook-up in a B-movie cinema, and the shimmering ballad ‘The Rainbow Room’ offers a blow-by-blow account of Marc’s visit to the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. ‘Losing Yourself’ and ‘After Hours’ delve into the darkness that often lurks beyond the dance floor.
“The Danceteria album reflects what we were going through as Brits in New York,” concludes Marc. “We arrived there in 1981 with a bunch of songs that were initially written about London and Leeds. They were songs that reflected the greyness and repression of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. But once we hit New York, the same songs became infused with a fresh, streetwise sensibility. We were in the clubs, where ecstasy was available for the first time, and we felt privileged to be part of that secret. Our music took on a hybrid quality. We were quintessentially British, but we felt that we were also an honorary American band. So it feels right that the last Soft Cell album is invested in those myths and stories. It brings everything full circle for us, and it’s a fitting tribute to Dave.”
Track listing:
Vinyl:
Side A
Elusive (Vinyl Edit)
Danceteria
The Space Inside (Vinyl Edit)
Times Square (Vinyl Edit)
Two Of A Kind
The Rainbow Room (Vinyl Edit)
In Heaven (When I Dance With You)
Side B
Decadence Is Hard Work
Losing Yourself
After Hours
Wave To America
Out Come The Freaks
CD:
Elusive
Danceteria
The Space Inside
Times Square
Two Of A Kind
The Rainbow Room
In Heaven (When I Dance With You)
Decadence Is Hard Work
Crackland
What Is Your Morality
Losing Yourself
After Hours
Wave To America
Out Come The Freaks
Danceteria is released 25th September 2026. Pre-order via https://republicofmusic.lnk.to/Danceteriaalbum
Main pic: Mike Owen