After nearly five decades together, Soft Cell are preparing to draw the curtain on one of British pop’s most enduring and influential partnerships. Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s sixth studio album, Danceteria, will also be their last.
Conceived as a farewell to a city that helped define them, Danceteria traces a loose passage through early-1980s New York, moving from after-dark excess through dawn-lit reflection and back towards the dancefloor. The album revisits a period that proved formative for both Almond and Ball, who recorded their first three albums in the city and absorbed its particular mix of glamour, danger, decadence and possibility. Across its songs, Soft Cell channels that atmosphere with a sense of scale, humor, and hard-won perspective, bringing together sweeping pop architecture and richly detailed scene-setting.
Long before Soft Cell borrowed its name for a final bow, Danceteria stood as one of downtown New York’s great nocturnal institutions, a club where pop, art, fashion, film, and fame collided beneath one roof. Founded in 1980 by Rudolf Piper and Jim Fouratt, it became a multi-floor playground for live music, DJs, video installations, and exhibition space, treating the nightclub as a cultural laboratory rather than a room with a bar and a sound system. Its celebrated West 21st Street incarnation became a crucial meeting point for new wave, post-punk, hip-hop, and downtown art, hosting New Order, Soft Cell, The Smiths, Run-D.M.C., and Madonna, while Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Dianne Brill moved through its glittering orbit. Brill, married to Piper, became the club’s unofficial queen and social ambassador, connecting the dancefloor to fashion, art, media, and celebrity culture with lacquered confidence.
That sense of place sits at the center of Danceteria, Soft Cell’s sixth and final studio album. For Marc Almond and Dave Ball, early 1980s New York was more than scenery. It was where the pair recorded their first three albums, absorbed the city’s pleasure, danger, and dirty glamour, and sharpened the Soft Cell language into something elegant, excessive, and sly.
“Danceteria is a love letter to early 1980s New York,” says Marc Almond. “The time we spent there – recording our first three albums – shaped us both as artists and as people. Celebrating that period felt like the right farewell for Dave Ball and the final Soft Cell studio album.”
The album now carries an extra emotional charge. Ball co-wrote and co-produced Danceteria, completing work on it only two days before his death on 22 October 2025. Those closest to the project chose to honour Ball’s wishes by keeping the release exactly as planned. The result is a farewell finished on its creators’ own terms, a final document of a partnership that lasted 47 years and altered British pop with wit, sleaze, vulnerability, and strange glamour.
For Almond, Ball’s absence closes the door on future Soft Cell recordings.
“There can be no more Soft Cell recordings without Dave – it simply wouldn’t be possible,” he says. “The sad truth is that Dave Ball was half of Soft Cell, and apart from performing live, I can’t write Soft Cell songs without him.”
The title track opens the album with a disco-pop rush and a stream of consciousness delivery of fond memories of the place, paired with a joyously odd video by collage artist Vicki Bennett. Its underground glamour brings to mind Dennis Parker, John Sex, and the art-damaged end of Manhattan disco, while Almond’s voice rides over Ball’s John Barry-styled minor chords with theatrical bite.
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Due September 25th 2026, via Republic of Music, Danceteria will be released on vinyl and CD, with the CD edition expanded to 14 tracks through the bonus cuts Crackland and What Is Your Morality.
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