Soft Cell announce final album Danceteria, completed days before Dave Ball’s death

Soft Cell will release Danceteria, their sixth and final studio album, on 25th September via Republic of Music.

Dave Ball, who co-founded Soft Cell with Marc Almond as art students in Leeds in the late 1970s, died peacefully in his sleep at his London home on 22nd October 2025, aged 66. He had spent the last two years of his life performing in a wheelchair following a series of serious health setbacks, including fractured vertebrae, cracked ribs, a broken wrist, pneumonia and sepsis that left him hospitalised for seven months. Despite all of that, he had been in, in Almond’s words, “a great place emotionally” through the summer of 2025, focused on completing the album. Danceteria was finished just days before his death. His final live appearance with Soft Cell was at the Rewind Festival in Henley-on-Thames in August 2025, where the duo played to over 20,000 fans.

Almond has been unequivocal about what the record’s existence means. “I take some solace from the fact that he heard the finished record and felt that it was a great piece of work,” he has said. “Dave’s music is better than ever. His tunes and hooks are still unmistakably Soft Cell, yet he always took it to the next level too.” He has also confirmed that the record will be the last. “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.”

The album’s title refers to the legendary New York nightclub of the early 1980s that shaped both Ball and Almond profoundly during the period when they recorded their first three albums in the city. Danceteria is, in Almond’s words, “a love letter to New York in the early 80s” and “a fitting farewell to Dave Ball.” The title track is out now: synth-driven, multifaceted in its emotional range, moving between celebration of that era and wistful acknowledgement of what has been lost.

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Danceteria is out 25th September via Republic of Music and is available to pre-order on vinyl, CD and digital.

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