British synth-pop duo Erasure [ tickets ] is a week away from releasing its new album, "Light at the End of the World," and will be in the US to support the set beginning early next month.

Andy Bell and Vince Clarke will start with the 16-city True Colors tour, which kicks off Gay & Lesbian Pride Month June 8 in Las Vegas. Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry, The Dresden Dolls, The Gossip, The Misshapes and host Margaret Cho will take part in the concerts, which will feature five hours of nonstop music, according to a press release. A portion of the proceeds from the outing will go to the Human Rights Campaign, according to organizers.

Following the True Colors run, Erasure will play a handful of headlining dates in the US, beginning July 6 with three shows in Florida. The group will then head out for gigs in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Mexico before resuming the US trek, which wraps Aug. 3 in Brooklyn, NY; a major European jaunt follows in September.

Domestic dates are listed below; international shows can be found at Erasure's website.

Bell, Clarke and producer Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) spent six weeks last autumn holed up in a cottage abutting the woods of mid-coast Maine to record "Light at the End of the World," a setting that inspired Bell to write what a press release describes as some of the most intensely personal lyrics of his career--"true mediations on love, loss, regret, hope and starting over"--while sticking to the group's electronic roots.

"This album is to show people that our pop isn't finished," Bell stated. "It's saying we can still do it, we can still write great songs," he continued, pointing to Erasure's appeal. "We're a bizarre mixture; people don't get it a lot of the time. We're quite British and working class--working people love a good tune in a pub--but we're also quite eccentric. We're the UK version of Sparks: the Gilbert & George of electronic pop. And we don't play the game."

An album sampler is streaming at Erasure's MySpace page.

The new set follows last year's "Union Street," on which Bell and Clarke present acoustic versions of 11 songs spanning the band's two-decade career.