Soft Cell have turned the lights down on their farewell album. Amid the club-floor pulse of Danceteria, the English synth-pop duo’s sixth and final studio record, sits “The Rainbow Room” — a shimmering ballad that lifts Marc Almond and the late Dave Ball out of the downtown night and onto the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The track arrives as part of an album due September 25 via Republic of Music, billed as both a love letter to early-1980s Manhattan and a last collaboration completed days before Ball’s death in October 2025. Official notes describe the song as a blow-by-blow account of Almond’s visit to the Rainbow Room, the Art Deco supper club high above Midtown, where the pair once drank margaritas between sessions at Mediasound in Hell’s Kitchen.
That setting is no decorative flourish. Soft Cell recorded their first three albums in New York after “Tainted Love” made them international names. They launched Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret with a Times Square-themed party at Danceteria, met Andy Warhol at the Factory, and moved through the same downtown rooms where a young Madonna was still finding her footing. Danceteria returns to that city on purpose: the grey, repressed Britain of their early songs rewritten by the streetwise energy of a city that, Almond has said, “opened up a whole new world of possibilities.”
“The Rainbow Room” is the album’s quiet counterweight. Where the title track and “Times Square” lean into flashing lights, hook-ups and after-hours risk, the ballad looks out over the skyline from a room built for glamour and distance. Press materials call it shimmering rather than stark — closer in spirit to Soft Cell’s great torch songs than to the industrial grind of This Last Night in Sodom. For a group whose catalogue has always balanced sleaze and sentiment, the choice is characteristic: the same city that produced “Sex Dwarf” also produced “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” and “Torch.”
Almond has been clear that there will be no further Soft Cell records without Ball. “There can be no more recordings of Soft Cell without Dave, it would not be possible,” he said when the album was announced. “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.” Danceteria was finished two days before Ball died. The ballad, like the rest of the set, is therefore both memory and last word.
The album’s earlier singles — a cover of Was (Not Was)’s “Out Come the Freaks,” the title track, “In Heaven (When I Dance With You),” and the darker “The Space Inside” — have mapped the record’s range from dance-floor tribute to late-night confession. “The Rainbow Room” is the piece that asks listeners to look up instead of down: not the club on West 21st Street this time, but the view from Rockefeller Center, a young English singer taking in a city that remade him.
Danceteria is available for pre-order now and arrives September 25. For a duo that once treated New York as both playground and proving ground, the ballad is a fitting last glance from the 65th floor.
