Soft Cell has titled its farewell with a phrase that points in two directions at once: an ending, and a return to origins. "Soft Cell Finds an Ending Back Where It All Began" is the framing the duo has chosen for a record that closes the book on a career that started in the clubs.

The album looks back on wilder times. But the man who lived those times has changed. Marc Almond, the band's singer, told interviewers that he now finds the idea of club-hopping "completely abhorrent."

"I don't have the energy," Almond said.

The quotes are brief. They are also the whole point. A pop career built on nightlife's pulse — Soft Cell emerged from the early-1980s electronic and synth scene, with Almond's theatrical vocals over Dave Ball's machines — is being wound down by a frontman who no longer wants any part of the environment that formed it.

Almond's remarks cut against the nostalgia the album itself invites. A record that revisits wilder years is being promoted alongside a candid admission from its author that the lifestyle under review holds no appeal. That tension — celebration on the vinyl, rejection in the interview — gives the farewell its character.

There is no affectation in the statement. "Completely abhorrent" is not the language of fond remembrance. It is the language of a performer drawing a hard line between the person who made the music and the person releasing it.

"I don't have the energy" lands even more plainly. Almond does not frame his distance from the club world as a matter of taste alone. He frames it as a matter of stamina. The sentence is five words long, and it ends the discussion.

For a band whose identity was forged in dance-floor culture, the closing statement is unambiguous: the beginning is being honored, but the habits of the beginning are not. Almond looks back. He does not go back.

What remains is the album itself — a document of wilder times, made by someone who says he has left them behind, and released under a title that ties the ending to the place where everything started.