Soft Cell – *Happiness Not Included

British synth-pop duo Soft Cell was formed in Leeds in 1979 by singer Marc Almond and producer/musician David Ball, and rose to fame in 1981 with the song “Tainted Love.” In the same year, their platinum-selling debut album “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” was released. Three more longplayers followed in the 1980s and their comeback album “Cruelty Without Beauty” in 2002. Then it became largely quiet around the band. Until now.

Frontman Marc Almond said in a press release about “*Happiness Not Included”: “In this album, I wanted to look at us as a society: a place where we have chosen to put profits over people, money over morality and decency, food over animal rights, bigotry over fairness, and our own trivial comforts over the unspeakable torment of others. But there’s also a belief in the album that there is a utopia, if we can peel back the layers and understand what really matters.”