Soft Cell – the British synth-pop duo of Marc Almond and producer / instrumentalist David Ball – have announced their first album of new material in 20 years. * Happiness Not Included is coming through BMG in spring 2022, and no, the asterisk is not a typo. They also announced a November tour of the UK. Check out the album cover and tracklist below.
Frontman Marc Almond said in a press release: “In this album I wanted to see ourselves as a society: a place where we chose to put profit before people, money before morality and decency, food before animal rights and fanaticism” to put fairness and our own trivial comforts from the untold torments of others. But there is also the conviction in the album that there is a utopia when we can peel off the layers and understand what really matters. “
Soft Cell released “Northern Lights” in 2018, part of a compilation called The Singles – Keychains & Snowstorms. This contained another original song called “Guilty (‘Cos I Say You Are’) and came together with the retrospective box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story.
Soft Cell’s last album of new and original material, Cruelty Without Beauty, was released in 2002. Read more about Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” in “The Story of Goth in 33 Songs”.
* Happiness not included:
01 happy happy happy
02 polaroid
03 Bruises on my illusions
04 Purple zone
05 Heart like Chernobyl
06 Light sleepers
07 * Happiness not included
08 nostalgia machine
09 night hawks
10 I’m not a friend of God
11 Calm down
12 New Eden
