Most synth-pop acts at the time were chasing the newest digital gear, but the Pet Shop Boys did the opposite. The British duo — singer Neil Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe — had grown tired of the thin, sampled sounds around them, so they hired producer Harold Faltermeyer precisely because he knew analog synthesizers inside out. On October 22, 1990, their fourth studio album, Behaviour, arrived on Parlophone with exactly that warm, old-school electronic glow.
Three studios and ten songs
The recording sessions ran from April to June across three studios: Red Deer in Munich, plus Sarm West and Abbey Road in London. Faltermeyer's analog expertise shaped every track, and the duo wrote all ten songs themselves. The album runs just over 49 minutes, but it packs a stylistic range that surprised listeners who expected another dancefloor record.
Behaviour blends synth-pop, dance-pop and symphonic pop, and it sounds nothing like the album before it, Introspective, or the one after it, Very. Where those records leaned on club energy, this one made room for guitar-led pop ballads like 'This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave'. The shift was deliberate: the duo wanted richer, more organic textures, and analog machines gave them exactly that.
Melancholy, singles and a cut track
There is also a sadness running through the record that the duo did not plan. Chris Lowe has said they set out to make an uplifting album, but the result came out the opposite way. That melancholy shows up in 'My October Symphony', a song about the decline of the Soviet Union, with guitar work from Johnny Marr and orchestral arrangements by Angelo Badalamenti on two of the album's ballads. The album's singles kept that mood alive well into 1991. 'Being Boring' arrived on November 12, 1990, with a video by Bruce Weber, and 'Jealousy' followed on May 28, 1991; in its extended version Tennant reads passages from Shakespeare's Othello. The b-side of 'Jealousy' included a demo of 'Losing My Mind', a song the duo had produced for Liza Minnelli. The album also nearly included 'Miserablism', a satire of Morrissey, but it was cut on the day the record was sent for mastering.
A key influence came from Depeche Mode's Violator, released earlier that year. Lowe admitted that record 'raised the stakes', pushing Pet Shop Boys to think harder about songwriting and sound. The first single, 'So Hard', came out on September 24, 1990, a month before the album, and set the tone: polished, precise, but with a new emotional weight underneath.
The recording itself took ten weeks with a break in the middle, a relatively compact schedule for an album this layered. Every song bears the Tennant-Lowe writing credit, and the analog-first decision shaped the whole project. Faltermeyer's role was not just technical; his feel for older synthesizers gave Behaviour a texture that digital tools of the era could not match.
Critics noticed the difference quickly. The album earned spots on year-end lists and later appeared in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. But the deeper legacy is simpler: Pet Shop Boys proved that stepping away from the newest technology could make an electronic album feel more human, not less. Behaviour remains the clearest example of that risk paying off. The album's reputation grew with each reissue. In 2001 it was expanded as Behaviour: Further Listening: 1990–1991 with a bonus disc of b-sides and previously unreleased recordings, and a fresh remaster of that two-disc edition appeared in 2018. Critics also kept returning to it: Entertainment Weekly's Jim Farber called it the duo's best melodies to that point, and Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune noted that the album reveals itself on repeated listens.
Pet Shop Boys proved that stepping away from the newest technology could make an electronic album feel more human, not less.