More than 16 years ago, Neil Tennant emerged as the Noel Coward of dance pop when he and fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe exhorted all the young dudes to "make lots of money." Like the playwright, Tennant sauntered on to the scene fully jaded, his wit already acerbic, his ironies prickly with cynicism.

But whereas Coward's ingrained misanthropy made him distrustful of romantic love in any guise, Tennant, at least since 1990's "Behavior," has progressed from giving love the benefit of the doubt to allowing it that special place in the universe that pop music has always acknowledged. Some have theorized that Coward, too, would have softened had he lived through the AIDS crisis, but Tennant seems to hold love apart from all other considerations, the only absolute in a world stained by compromise.

The new Pet Shop Boys album, "Release," is almost all ballads, a form that further blurs the demarcations between Tennant's love songs and his cultural observations. One of the reasons the Boys have released so many remix collections (besides the one of making lots of money) is that they remain dance-pop artists even while their creative inclinations become more introspective as they grow older. The perfect synthesis of personal expression and party digression that was "Very" (1993) may now be impossible to achieve. You are, truly, only young once.