Nonetheless: Pet Shop Boys at Full Songwriting Height

Nonetheless, Pet Shop Boys’ fifteenth studio album, finds the synthpop duo paring four decades of craft down to analog warmth, strings, and melancholy. Produced by James Ford and recorded in 2023, it arrived on 26 April 2024 as the band’s highest-charting album in nearly thirty years, debuting at number two in the UK. Written remotely during lockdown, the record trades the duo’s denser arrangements for something airier — ten songs that read as a late-career statement of intent rather than a victory lap.

What James Ford Took Away

The defining production decision on Nonetheless was subtractive. James Ford — the producer behind records by Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, and Blur — was brought in not to enlarge the Pet Shop Boys’ sound but to discipline it. By the band’s own account, Ford “dared” them to make their sometimes complicated demos more minimal, stripping arrangements back until each song’s structure carried the weight on its own. He replaced the duo’s soft-synths with analog synthesizers, recording mostly at his East London studio in 2023, and the difference is audible in the texture: where a software patch sits flat in the mix, the analog signal drifts and breathes. That instability is the record’s warmth. Against the synths, Ford placed a live orchestra — the Elysian Collective appears on every track, with strings, flugelhorn, French horn, and harp filling out the harmonic space rather than merely decorating it. The opener, “Loneliness,” demonstrates the method: an up-tempo synth pulse underneath a lyric that begins in sadness, with strings entering to lift the final third rather than swelling from the start. “Feel” is sparser still, built on texture and restraint, its emotional register set by what the arrangement withholds. Ford handled the mix himself, with Matt Colton mastering, and the priority throughout is clarity over loudness — parallel layers stay legible, and the orchestral takes keep their analog soul instead of being compressed into uniformity. For a duo forty years into their catalog, this is not nostalgia production; it is a deliberate modernization of method. The closest recent parallel in the GetMusic catalog is the late-period reinvention New Order pursued on Education, Entertainment, Recreation — another synthpop institution choosing curation over expansion. Ford’s contribution is best measured not by what he added but by what he convinced Tennant and Lowe to leave out.

Characters, Defectors, and Double Lives

Neil Tennant has always written in the third person as easily as the first, and Nonetheless is populated with richly drawn figures. “Dancing Star” tells the story of Rudolf Nureyev, the Soviet ballet dancer who defected to the West in 1961, set to a track that still carries the seagull samples of Chris Lowe’s original beach-themed demo. “A New Bohemia” trades in nostalgia for creative scenes, its lyric partly inspired by an exhibit on Les Petites Bon-Bons, a collective of gay conceptual artists in 1970s Los Angeles. “Feel” — a song first offered to Brandon Flowers more than a decade earlier — was reworked into a meditation on visiting a loved one in prison, drawing on a biography of the spy George Blake. “New London Boy” turns the lens inward, recounting Tennant’s own arrival in the capital. The thread connecting these is a queer cultural memory: the duo described Nonetheless in interviews as their “queer album,” and the songs map a lineage of outsiders, defectors, and double lives without ever lapsing into manifesto. Tennant’s vocal performance suits the material — measured, conversational, more spoken than belted, leaving the orchestra to supply the swell he no longer needs to force. The melancholy that runs through the record is reflective rather than mournful; even “Loneliness,” written last and inspired directly by lockdown isolation, resolves toward something closer to acceptance. Across ten tracks and a tidy 44-minute runtime, the writing avoids the trap that snares most heritage acts — it neither chases contemporary slang nor retreats into pastiche. The characters are specific, the cultural references are esoteric by design, and the emotional logic is adult. It is songwriting that assumes its audience will follow a reference rather than needing it explained.

A Map Drawn by Devotion, Not Virality

The geographic data on GetMusic confirms what the chart split implies. The United Kingdom is the strongest market by a wide margin at 7,700 listeners, followed by Poland at 2,000 and Chile at 1,800, with the Netherlands, Argentina, Sweden, and Finland trailing close behind. The full map runs to only 13 countries — a tight footprint compared with a current pop release — but the composition of that footprint is revealing. Poland, Chile, and Argentina ranking this high is not an accident of streaming algorithms; these are long-standing Pet Shop Boys strongholds, territories where the duo’s synthpop has been a fixture since the 1980s and where their touring has consistently drawn. The audience here is generational and deliberate. It follows the band across decades rather than discovering it through a playlist. The UK figure, meanwhile, anchors the record at home, where Tennant and Lowe remain a national cultural institution and where the autobiographical pull of a song like “New London Boy” lands with the most resonance. Stylistically, Nonetheless sits inside a specific synthpop tradition — the strand that treats the genre as a vehicle for melancholy, irony, and grandeur rather than dancefloor utility. Its closest peer is the late-career work of fellow 1980s survivors Soft Cell, whose *Happiness Not Included performs the same act of an electronic veteran writing reflectively about time and endurance. Pet Shop Boys are not competing with younger synthpop acts so much as demonstrating what the form sounds like when its practitioners have lived inside it long enough to use it as autobiography.

The Case For and Against Consistency

Critics received Nonetheless warmly. It holds an 81 on Metacritic — classified as universal acclaim — and a 7.9 aggregate on AnyDecentMusic?, with Clash and The Line of Best Fit both at 8/10. It placed on year-end lists at Classic Pop (number eight), The Guardian (number 21), and Albumism (number 21). Mojo’s Victoria Segal wrote that the album shows the duo “not just forging on, but flourishing,” while The Line of Best Fit framed it as the work of “elder statesmen who can look to the future while comfortably acknowledging the past.” The consensus is strong, but the most useful review is the most qualified one. The Independent’s Helen Brown praised the songcraft while noting the album maintains the band’s quality control “without any notable change in sonic style” — and that observation locates the record’s one real vulnerability. Nonetheless is consistent to the point of predictability. A listener hoping for the kind of structural risk the duo took on records like Behaviour or Fundamental will find instead a refinement of a known formula, and Ford’s orchestral sheen, for all its warmth, occasionally smooths an edge that might have been left sharp. The high points are unambiguous: “Loneliness” is among the best singles the duo has released this century, “Dancing Star” marries narrative ambition to a genuine hook, and “A New Bohemia” is quietly one of Tennant’s finest lyrics. The weaker stretches — a mid-album lull where craft outpaces inspiration — never collapse, but they do coast. The fair verdict is that consistency at year forty is itself the achievement. Set against the full sweep of the band’s catalog, traceable on their GetMusic artist page, Nonetheless is not a reinvention and does not pretend to be one. It is the sound of a duo that knows precisely what it does well, executing it with a producer disciplined enough to keep them honest. For a fifteenth album, that is a rare and unshowy kind of success.

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Setenay Mira KAYA