Soft Cell close the circle with Danceteria

Soft Cell will release their sixth and final studio album, *Danceteria*, on 25 September 2026, through Republic of Music. The record is framed as a song cycle that evokes the grit and joy of downtown New York in the early 1980s — and the Danceteria club where Marc Almond and Dave Ball recorded their debut, *Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret*.

Almond has called the album “a love letter to New York in the early 80s” and “a fitting farewell to Dave Ball”, and has said there can be no further Soft Cell recordings without him. Multi-instrumentalist Dave Ball died in 2025. The album was completed before his death. Almond will continue live work with the band’s catalogue.

From *Tainted Love* to the last studio word

Soft Cell are an English synth-pop duo who came to prominence in the early 1980s: Almond on vocals, David Ball on instruments. They are known above all for their 1981 hit version of “Tainted Love” and for the platinum-selling debut *Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret*, also from 1981. A companion set, *Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing*, followed in 1982. That first run fixed the pair in British electronic pop and tied their recorded story to the New York club world, which the new album now revisits by name and by mood.

The years that followed brought further studio work, remix projects and reissues. More recently the catalogue has kept moving: 2024 saw *Happiness Now Completed* and a cluster of EPs including *Bedsitter E.P.*, *Memorabilia / A Man Could Get Lost E.P.*, *Torch E.P.* and *What? E.P.*; 2025 brought *First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love* and *Martin*. Against that backdrop, *Danceteria* is presented as the sixth studio album and the last — finished while Ball was still alive to hear the mixes, and released as a deliberate full stop.

A farewell written in the club that started it

The choice of title does more than nod at a venue. Soft Cell’s debut was bound up with that early-eighties downtown scene; the final record returns to it as a song cycle rather than a simple retrospective. Almond’s own wording places Ball at the centre of the ending: a farewell, and an explicit line under any future Soft Cell studio work. What remains in motion is the live catalogue. Almond will keep taking those songs on stage even as the duo’s recording life closes.

For listeners who still hear “Tainted Love” and the *Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret* material in heavy rotation, the stakes are plain. The album itself follows on 25 September 2026. After more than four decades, Soft Cell’s last new studio statement is a return to the room where the story began, dedicated to the partner without whom Almond says it cannot continue.