Forty years ago this April, Pet Shop Boys declared their M.O.: “We’ve got no future/We’ve got no past/Here today, built to last,” Neil Tennant intoned in the middle eight of “West End Girls” (its first, less successful Bobby Orlando incarnation, before the canonical Stephen Hague version arrived a year later). Currency fuels the British duo’s output, which has never ceased over those four decades, nor attempted to rehash former glories. It’s inevitable that a band that drew in several generations of pop fans would take on a nostalgic hue, but somewhat surprising that Tennant and his foil, Chris Lowe, have leaned into it so intensively in recent years. There have been full-catalogue reissues and a revamped singles collection; a BBC documentary, a greatest hits tour that spanned three years. They released Nonetheless, their best album of the 21st century, in April, but only three songs from it made their current setlist; a medley to open the BBC ballroom show “Strictly Come Dancing” last month featured no songs released after 1993 (their cover of Mott the Hoople’s 1972 hit “All the Young Dudes,” from this new deluxe edition of the 2024 album, is the only relative concession to novelty).
Perhaps this retromania speaks to the difficulty of maintaining attention as musicians aged 65 (Lowe) and 70 (Tennant), a state of invisibility they mourned on 2012’s downbeat Elysium. But it feels odd, because the character studies on Nonetheless burst with life, their leading men defying cultural norms to chase big dreams—of queer love, self-actualization, promised lands, artistic freedom—and succeeding. Pet Shop Boys even made the album in spite of the pandemic separating them and the future of live music looking iffy: Tennant learned to programme GarageBand and self-record, and they didn’t doubt for a second that gigs would return. Their trilogy of thumping dance records with Stuart Price between 2013 and 2020 had kept them sounding fairly au courant, though by Hotspot, Tennant’s lyrical perspective felt resigned. No such state of affairs on the James Ford-produced Nonetheless, a return to songwriterly grandeur that glitters with opulence; it’s the most potent swig of Pet Shop Boys’ cocktail of synths and strings in years.
In 2018, Tennant said that the diminishing frequency of love songs on Pet Shop Boys albums was because “maybe there’s been less to write about, I’m afraid.” Hotspot had the rather pro forma “Wedding in Berlin,” which interpolated Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” and repeated, “We’re getting married, married, married,” in a fairly loveless monotone. What a tonic it is to hear Tennant swoon again on Nonetheless, admiring Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev fleeing the Soviet Union on “Dancing Star,” which has something of the ocean glitter and exultant mood of 1988’s “Domino Dancing” (not to mention many healthy stabs at the orchestra-stab key by Lowe, its greatest player); giving himself over to someone entirely on the luxuriant “Feel,” likening their time on a terrace to “a Rosetti frieze”; enraptured, amid the smoldering, filigreed bossa nova of “The Secret of Happiness,” by a gent who’s hung Peter Blake’s “Babe Rainbow, framed from the Sunday Times,” on his wall. The worst you can say about these songs is that Tennant’s verses have taken on a bit of a standardized form. Art and love, and devout faith in both, are liberating, protective forces on Nonetheless, and Tennant casts his own such origin story alongside this parade of dreamers as proof of concept and another fable ripe for the retelling.
Although Roxy Music get a nod in “New London Boy,” the song’s patron saint is David Bowie, right down to the title. It depicts the young Tennant leaving Newcastle—where the queer scene featured a drag queen who carried a brick in her bag—for London, to hang out with “my glam rock brothers” and hold court “with the screamers who dress for excess.” He has called it “what happens between verses two and three of ‘Being Boring,’” Pet Shop Boys’ devastating 1990s song about their generation of gay men being annihilated by the AIDS crisis; his Bowie-led journey to becoming “the creature that I always meant to be,” as he sang then, mingles cocksureness and insecurity with vivid immediacy. It would have been easy to dress a song like this up in awkward glam costuming were that not anathema to Pet Shop Boys’ style; instead, Lowe’s instrumentation is a shimmering reverie of winking keys and sauntering bounce, both buoyant with potential and utterly transporting.
As much as these songs teem with admiration for those who took big leaps and landed, it’s hard to avoid the fact that they’re all set in the past. “Dancing Star” looks back to “when the streets of London sang with pop stars”; “A New Bohemia” tells a very Isherwoodian story of a faded radical forgotten by contemporary hipsters, traipsing the streets of Los Angeles and wondering what happened to their scene of frenzied queer cultural innovators (hat-tipping the lesser-known glitter-rockin’, mail-art-sending gay Wisconsin activists les Petites Bons-Bons). The synths make way for a sophisticated arrangement of cresting strings and piano that sounds nothing short of valedictory, although its narrator seems desperate to keep living his life in their image, not to succumb to “the sweet smell of regret,” intoxicating as it may be.
You might call Nonetheless a eulogy for the concept of cultural promised lands were it not for this yearning for enduring vigor and connection. On pumping lead single “Loneliness,” festooned with riotous horns, Tennant adopts a classically schoolmasterish tone as he warns against sequestering oneself away. “Who is here to help you out?/Oh tell me, can’t you guess?” he huffs, exasperated but stalwart. The relentless “Why Am I Dancing?” (which rewrites a ballad from their in-the-works musical based on “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) has someone else skipping town to start over, aware they’ll “need all the help I can find.” These are magnetic songs, their romantic intensity given stakes by two others that nod slyly to less purehearted versions of idealism.
At the outset of the year, no one would have bet on the scenario in a Pet Shop Boys song becoming a global headline, but the sneering “Bullet for Narcissus” is sung from the perspective of a bodyguard who knows he may have to sacrifice himself to defend an attempt on Trump’s life, much as he loathes him. What might quickly have been dated is horribly timely; that said, perhaps it would have been better off forgotten, as it detracts from the album’s otherwise gorgeous mood. And it’s easy to see why “The Schlager Hit Parade” could be one of Pet Shop Boys’ most divisive songs. It’s about the way postwar German pop blasted a rosy, propagandist light on a decimated and shamed country; they play the song in the still-thriving genre’s major-chord style, right down to the massive dinging bells. “It’s always Christmas or the sound of summer/In the Schlager hit parade,” Tennant rhapsodizes, and I can see how you would hate this very silly song if you’re not in the particular Venn diagram crossover of Pet Shop Boys fans and 20th-century German history obsessives, or if you have no sense of humor.
This deluxe edition of Nonetheless includes demos for every song, which are so fully formed that it’s like watching Tennant and Lowe take off their suits to reveal slightly more rudimentary suits underneath; Ford was not tasked with turning any frogs into princes in the studio. The bonus material underscores Tennant’s suggestion that this is Pet Shop Boys’ “queer album,” much as Behaviour or Bilingual acolytes might choke on their cornflakes at the notion. The cover of adopted gay anthem “All the Young Dudes” feels a bit like karaoke, given the uncanny sound of Tennant singing in—heaven forbid—something approaching an American accent; more successful is a cover of soul song “The Dark End of the Street,” a much-reprised mid-’60s hit about forbidden love that couldn’t be more apt: “It’s a sin and we know it’s wrong,” Tennant sings, “Oh, but our love keeps coming on strong.”
So it is for the infatuated lovers on the only additional original, the rather Masseduction-y “Adrenaline,” who wonder whether what they’re feeling is the thrill of the chase, “or just the speed of life you hope you have embraced?” Nonetheless feels like Pet Shop Boys finding a new gear as they enter their fifth decade, with at least half its songs worthy of sharing setlist space with their classics. Defiant and hopeful in every sense, it should leave you in no doubt that life still holds a lot of opportunities, if you know when to take them—as Pet Shop Boys should, too.
