With the September release of their final album Danceteria, and a just-announced November 2026 tour, Soft Cell chanteur Marc Almond is preparing for the final chapter of his daring electronic-pop duo with the late, great David Ball. With Ball’s passage in 2025—just weeks after the completion of their tribute to the sleazy nightlife scene that bore them—Almond has promised that their sixth studio album since 1981’s soul-sonic classic Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret will be Soft Cell’s grand finale. “Dave Ball was as much Soft Cell as I was, and without him, it is not a question of whether I could continue; I just wouldn’t know how to,” said Almond after the first date of his recently wrapped US spring tour with The Human League.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Soft Cell will go quietly into the dark night—or even into the heavens. After releasing its first two singles earlier this year (the album’s title track, along with a cover of Was (Not Was)’s classic “Out Come the Freaks”), Soft Cell released “In Heaven (When I Dance with You)” a few weeks ago, which—like their very first single, “Memorabilia”—is minimalistic electropop at its finest. But there’s also something slinky, soulful, and bluesy about the proceedings. “This song, along with ‘Out Come the Freaks,’ were the last songs to be recorded for the album,” Almond shares. “I said to Dave that I'd love to end the recordings with some out-and-out feel-good pop to give the album more of an uplift, something with a Motown ’60s soul touch, which has been one of our signatures. There’s no real deep meaning in the words. It’s just a song about dancing, which is a running theme throughout the album.”
Dancing might be one element of the lyrics, but there’s another long-standing Soft Cell trope to be found within “Heaven”: the drama of the everyday and finding relief away from daily drudgery, this time with Almond “working each day in a dead-end job,” looking for release. “One of Soft Cell’s themes throughout the years has been escaping the mundane routine of everyday life,” Almond adds. “I’m glad the last things we recorded had such a good-time feeling of positivity.”
As for the electro-noir look of the single’s brand new video, starring a floating, sunglasses-wearing Almond roaming through the night skies, credit filmmaker-designer Vicki Bennet, the young artist behind Soft Cell’s current interactive staging filled with moving images of Almond and Ball roaming a pre-Disney-fied Times Square. “She is incredibly talented,” says Almond of Bennet’s mix of film, video, AI, and collage editing techniques. “I’m not a fan of all the AI slop that we're currently bombarded with, but some of it can be satirical and funny, and if used in a creative way as an artistic tool, it can even be magical. Vicki puts a lot of love and thought into our new videos. With Dave no longer with us, we can still feature him and make it Soft Cell. Dave would have loved it.”
And that’s heavenly. Check out the video and their upcoming North American tour dates below, and pre-order Danceteria ahead of its September 25 release here.
