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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.
