In the short film Loneliness, fashion photographer Alasdair McLellan responds astutely to the mystery of contemporary youth — those crazed, dissatisfied dupes of political agitation that our politicians or media neither investigate nor fully understand. Loneliness gets to the heart of the spiritual dissatisfaction and self-denial seen post-Covid and in both the pro-Hamas and pro–George Floyd rioting. Luca Guadagnino got halfway there in Challengers, but McLellan goes deeper. Inspired by the lead track off the new album Nonetheless, McLellan’s visual accompaniment shows that Pet Shop Boys are particularly alert to the moment.
Nonetheless is the 15th album from the Pet Shop Boys, the synth-pop duo always distinguished by a droll sensibility in conveying their personal politics. (“In the back of my head I heard distant feet / Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.”) McLellan’s film is set in 1992, going back to his own northern New England past and a peak of PSB’s creativity to reenact the development toward adulthood that is so crucial to the chaos engaged by Millennial youth.
McLellan depicts the insular emotions of romantically undecided working-class boys. Their leisure-time activities, after workdays spent at Sheffield Forgemasters foundry, are desperate yet blocked. The curly-haired, muscular hero wavers between sexual preferences while PSB expresses his private tension.
Singing about loneliness, Neil Tennant pledges, “There is a better fight / A cause close to my heart.” This isn’t social advocacy as in lesser PSB tracks; Loneliness avoids post-Obergefell “love wins” claptrap to render the profundity of desire, an end to loneliness plus romantic liberation. Tennant evokes “Ringo walking by the canal / Downcast and alone / A man who skims a stone” — that sweet scene from the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night that universalized individual longing and isolation. And movie-conscious McLellan visualizes that pang through not-furtive sidelong glances and then, most startlingly, a Jean Genet moment at an amusement park, when a handwritten note, wrapped around a pen, is passed through a wall’s hole: “Are you lonely?”
That single image will shock longtime listeners who may recall PSB’s 1990 “So Hard” and the subtlety of its Bertoluccian music video in which young men act out the song’s warning: “Why / Don’t we try / Not to break our hearts/ And make it so hard for ourselves?”
McLellan’s film is conceptualized to revisit the romantic experiences that pop music accompanies so well while also addressing larger issues. Loneliness adds nostalgia to Sheffield miners’ realism — stepping away from the social turmoil that bewilders today’s gender-addled pop audience to illustrate desire unclouded by politics. McLellan’s cut to a close-up of unbuttoned 501 jeans condenses a sexual subculture. It’s as sly as a PSB lyric. (“My life is a mess like an unmade bed.”) Tennant always brought his own intellection to Disco’s throbbing hedonism yet was hedonistic nonetheless, perfecting a musical idiom that his forerunner Noel Coward was too early to enjoy.
Nonetheless uses that advantage to instruct listeners on the fundamentals that Millennial pop has lost. But there’s genius in how Tennant (70) and co-composer Chris Lowe (64) appraise their own pop messages. When they show up bald and bespectacled at the end of McLellan’s film (Tennant uncannily resembles the late Terence Davies), their visages suggest the wisdom of pop elders. New songs such as “Feel,” “New London Boy,” “The Secret of Happiness” (with its clock-ticking rhythm echoing Roxy Music’s disco paen “Dance Away”), and “Why Am I Dancing?” are more directly moving than modern auto-fiction because these tales carry the texture of familiar experience.
The album’s title — PSB’s latest uncanny one-word rubric — indicates a deliberately negative-to-positive ordering of information, what art historians call a “pentimento.” Yet this isn’t a rehash of old hits, but a life retrospective. For PSB, disco’s beat is a sign of faith, an anthem of sensibility unlike Beyoncé’s pastiche Renaissance. The pulsating lead track has Donna Summer and Sylvester urgency — what critic Larry Flick called “disco melodrama.”
Within this particular genre, PSB have always explored a limitless field of interests, combining the complexity of sexual and political self-consciousness. The classic British theme of youth migrating to the big city (“The streets of London sang with pop stars / Well, the truth is they always do”) now takes on a mature questioning of naïve desire that has not passed. Since name-dropping Edmund Wilson’s socialist history To the Finland Station in the group’s first hit “West End Girls,” from 1986, Tennant’s left-leaning politics often pop up, but this time he assiduously avoids the political trends that now discombobulate (disco-combobulate) young people. “The future is the present now / The future lasts forever.”
Nonetheless sketches invented lives of those seeking a new bohemia or the secret of happiness. Each track’s scenario scrutinizes feral and fragile egos (“A Bullet for Narcissus,” a song that may be about Morrissey weathering cancel culture) with a sophistication that Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart would surely recognize. In the magisterial “Love Is the Law,” PSB undermines Pride Parade superficiality, getting to the core of behavior (“Love is the mood / And a slip of the tongue”), as Tennessee Williams rued. It’s the ultimate PSB retrospective. The Nonetheless recording session included an update of the 1990 gem “Being Boring,” acknowledged as a song about idealism and how it turns out. Enriching pop-music expression, PSB’s Nonetheless avoids infatuation with youth and politics to observe past and present experience (the living and the dead) side by side in the disco genre. Alasdair McLellan’s perfect music video is a Terence Davies movie after all.