There is something almost indecent about hearing Soft Cell look backward with this much grace. For a band that once made sleaze, synthetic dread, cheap rooms, lust, humiliation, and metropolitan bad behaviour feel like the natural furniture of pop music, The Rainbow Room finds Marc Almond and Dave Ball staring across Manhattan from 65 floors up and realizing that memory can be every bit as dangerous as desire.
The song comes from Danceteria, Soft Cell’s sixth and final studio album, completed shortly before Ball’s death in October 2025. It’s set in New York in the early ’80s, when Almond and Ball were recording at Mediasound, running around clubs, meeting Warhol, dancing near Madonna, and absorbing a city seemingly built for people with nowhere respectable to be. The Rainbow Room catches that romance at the point where exhilaration develops a crack.
Ball’s arrangement is spacious, elegant, and slightly narcotic. The electronics drift rather than stampede, giving Almond room to sing as though he were paging through photographs nobody else can see. His voice carries wisdom and gravitas; every phrase has the peculiar steadiness of a man who knows how unreliable memory can be yet still chooses to trust it – albeit with rose coloured glasses. This is, in short, Almond’s My Way.
The central image comes from Almond’s own birthday visit to Rockefeller Center. “… I did celebrate my birthday – my 21st or 22nd – at The Rainbow Room in the Rockefeller Center… The story of that view is true, too, I really did think: “Imagine falling down there” at the time,” Almond muses. “It was important to mention the Twin Towers, to acknowledge that this song about the future had a poignancy to it, knowing how dark that future would become.”
That line about falling is pure Soft Cell: glamour sharing a table with dread, champagne beside the abyss. The Twin Towers turn the song’s future tense into something brutal. Young Almond looks across New York wondering what comes next; older Almond sings from a world in which several answers are already known, including the death of his musical partner.
That knowledge changes the record’s emotional gravity. Ball heard the finished album before he passed away, and Almond has said no further Soft Cell recordings are possible without him. The Rainbow Room therefore carries a strange double exposure of youth and aftermath: two men in New York discovering possibility, then those same lives heard decades later through distance, death, and accumulated history.
The Rainbow Room takes nostalgia somewhere quieter and more devastating. The city still glitters below, the party is still downstairs, and Almond stands at the window remembering when the future looked endless.
Listen below:
With the untimely death of Dave Ball in 2025, the band’s sixth and final album, Danceteria, finally arrives on September 25, 2026. You can pre-order Danceteria here.
Marc Almond has announced another live run, this time in South America in late November to December. Prior to that, Marc will be playing more European shows in Italy and Poland from late September to October.
In early November, Marc returns to the States for a second time this year and will be touring as Soft Cell. The tour begins November 8th in San Diego and includes the Darker Waves festival in California on November 14th. Check out the full listings and ticket links here.
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