Forty-one years since their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and 20 since their last album, 2002’s underwhelming Cruelty Without Beauty, Soft Cell return with an album that makes the very best of their vantage point as synth-pop elders with an eye on the future. *Happiness Not Included cleverly compares the 80s promises of a future straight out of science-fiction (“rocket ships and monorails, electricity that never fails”) with how things have actually turned out. While these songs reference war, famine, loneliness, isolation and authoritarianism, Marc Almond’s witty lyrics and synth man David Ball’s bouncy tunes mean the mood is more wryly hopeful than bleak. Heart Like Chernobyl actually begins: “Oh dear / I feel like North Korea.”
Other songs are outrightly nostalgic. Bruises on All My Illusions gazes not exactly wistfully at Almond’s pre-fame days as a cloakroom attendant. Polaroid cheekily fuses the band’s real 80s meeting with Andy Warhol with an imaginary trip to his 1960s Factory (“Nico danced in oil-wheeled lights and Lou Reed had me in his sights”). But it’s harder to imagine their younger selves coming up with the sublime Light Sleepers, an almost symphonic hymn to outsiders; the serenely lovely, piano-led closer, New Eden, is a similarly an almost classical rallying call for a new society. Such musical progressions happily coexist with trademark electro bangers such as Purple Zone (recently released in a different version with the Pet Shop Boys) which raises a middle finger to ageing with a tune from their top drawer.