Soft Cell’s Final Album Turns Back to New York

Soft Cell’s final album, Danceteria, stands as a record of a partnership ended by Dave Ball’s death. Marc Almond has framed it as a love letter to the New York the pair first encountered as the 1980s began, and to the Leeds art school years that came before.

The album grew out of an unexpected return. Almond and Ball had not worked together in 17 years when they took on the O2 Arena in London to mark 40 years of the band. Almond expected a scattering of fans near the front; the show sold out within a weekend. The closing Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, performed by just the two of them, remains for him “one of the best moments of my career.” It was also a return to origins: their first gig had been in an art school common room, with a Revox tape recorder and a slide carousel standing in for a band.

Rather than let that finish there, Almond pushed for new songs. Happiness Not Included arrived in 2022, its making disrupted by the pandemic. Danceteria completes the work. Almond describes it as touching and varied in mood, light and dark by turns but ending in positivity, and speaks of the creative range Ball still had. In almost 50 years, he notes, they never fell out. The record is affectionate rather than mournful, and it carries the weight of a catalogue closing on its own terms.