Soft Cell’s final studio album will be a “fitting farewell” to late musician Dave Ball, his bandmate Marc Almond has said.
Danceteria will be released in September and will serve as a tribute to electronic musician Ball, who died in October 2025, aged 66, just two days after completing the record.
It will also act as a love letter to early 1980s New York City, where the duo recorded their first three albums.
The 12-track record will be their sixth and final studio album together and will commemorate almost five decades of the synth-pop duo making music together.
It was co-written and produced by Ball and is set in a Manhattan nightclub of the same name, where the pair would frequent in the early 1980s, and the New York nightlife is said to have influenced their early sound.
Soft Cell, best known for their chart-topping hit Tainted Love, recorded many of their early albums in the city, including Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981), The Art Of Falling Apart (1982) and This Last Night In Sodom (1984).
Frontman and vocalist Almond said the band has “always had a strong connection with New York”, crediting the city in the 1980s as a “particularly creative place for me”.
He also reflected on how the record is their last due to the death of his bandmate Ball, and said: “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.”
Almond added: “Danceteria is a love letter to New York in the early 80s.
“The time we spent in New York – where we recorded our first three 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.”
The record takes its name from the Manhattan nightclub where young Almond and Ball would party until the small hours after the recording sessions for their 1981 debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.
Almond added: “Soft Cell have always had a strong connection with New York, and my Soft Cell lyrics often look at America through British eyes.
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“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.”
He continued: “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.”
The title track from the album is released on Tuesday and is described as “a joyous, celebratory burst of disco pop”.
The album, available to pre-order now, will be released on September 25 via Republic of Music.