Hotspot (album)
2020 studio album by Pet Shop Boys

Hotspot is the fourteenth studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 24 January 2020 by the band's own label x2, through Kobalt Label Services. It was supported by the singles "Dreamland" featuring Years & Years, "Burning the Heather", "Monkey Business", and "I Don't Wanna". The duo planned the Dreamworld tour to promote the album in mid-2020, but it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The album reached number three on the charts in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain, and it was number one on Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart in the United States.
Background and recording
Hotspot was the third in a trilogy of albums produced by Stuart Price, following Electric (2013) and Super (2016). The album was primarily recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin where the duo had written "most of [their] music over the last ten years". During a ten-day session in November 2018, they used the studio's analogue equipment to give Hotspot a different quality from the digital sound of the previous two albums.
Several songs on Hotspot make reference to Berlin. Neil Tennant described the opening track, "Will-o-the-Wisp", as a queer song that imagines the author Christopher Isherwood encountering an ex-boyfriend from his 1939 autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin years later on a U-Bahn train. The bells of St.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q80436015. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2013, 2016 and 2018.
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