Everything But The Girl New Album: Fuse

It wasn’t until late 1994 that Everything But The Girl stormed the shores of terrestrial radio. For the next 2 years you couldn’t really escape EBTG. Not that I was actively trying to escape, it’s just that…they were everywhere. Whether it was cascading across the charts, on the radio, nightclubs, or MTV – there was no escape. As it turned out, it was exactly the escape I was dreaming of.  As a musician, it created a fork in the road for me that I’ve been on ever since. Decades after their last album, Everything But The Girl has one in the can and it’s right around the corner.

I have to pinch myself that it’s been 24 years since their last album Tempermental was released. Imagine my surprise when Everything But The Girl confirmed details of their new 10-track album Fuse!  Maybe I’ve died and gone to heaven, unknown. What I do know is it’s coming out on April 21, 2023 and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was starting to settle into the idea I would never hear music from them ever again and kind of felt lost at sea over it.

The first two singles – Nothing Left To Lose and Caution To The Wind are already out and are killing it. I’m actually listening to Caution to the Wind as I type these words.  And wait…there’s more!

Check out the video from Charlie Di Placido (Kojey Radical, Jungle)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6QKZJeK-5w

If the entire album is as good as these first two tracks, I’m afraid Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have been able to do something no other band has been able to do…which is keeping the irons just as hot as they were almost 30 years ago. The production is exactly what I would have anticipated if EBTG would had released another album not long after Tempermental.

Kiss me while the world decays, kiss me while the music plays…

Thorn’s voice is exactly as it was (maybe better) and her lyrics on Nothing Left To Lose and Caution To The Wind do that thing to me they’ve always done. Her overtones of loss, desire, desperation, longing, and hope are right there where they’ve always been.

Watt’s choice of effects, drums, pads, piano stabs, vocal fx, sonic space, and layering…the porridge is just right. The sub-bass and breakbeat opener on Nothing Left To Lose takes me back to those endless hours spent in 90’s nightclubs. This track is ageless and has the 1996 album Walking Wounded written all over it.

‘Ironically the finished sound of the new album was the last thing on our mind when we started in March 2021. Of course, we were aware of the pressures of such a long-awaited comeback, so we tried to begin instead in a spirit of open-minded playfulness, uncertain of the direction, receptive to invention’.

-Tracey Thorn

In 2021 Thorn and Watt recorded in secret at a small riverside studio outside Bath with friend and engineer Bruno Ellingham. Benn Watt explains the genesis of their recent work and capture what it’s like to start again…

“It was exciting. A natural dynamism developed. We spoke in short-hand, and little looks, and co-wrote instinctively. It became more than the sum of our two selves. It just became Everything But The Girl on its own”

-Ben Watt

The reforged studio partnership between Thorn and Watt organically created the album title. ‘After so much time apart professionally, there was both a friction and a natural spark in the studio when we began’, says Thorn. ‘However much we underplayed it at the start, it was like a fuse had been lit. And it ended in a kind of coalescence, an emotional fusion. It felt very real and alive’.

Everything But The Girl New Album Fuse is set for release on April 21, 2023 on Buzzin’ Fly Records through Virgin Music Group, except North America, where it is released specifically on Buzzin’ Fly Records through Verve.