Everything But The Girl have returned with their single/ “Nothing Left To Lose”, accompanied by a video from director Charlie Di Placido (Kojey Radical, Jungle). Everything But The Girl’s new album Fuse will drop on April  21, 2023 via Buzzin’ Fly Records through Virgin Music Group, and in North America, via Buzzin’ Fly Records through Verve.

Written and produced by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn over the spring-summer of 2021, Fuse is a modern take on the lustrous electronic soul the band first pioneered in the mid-90s. Thorn’s affecting and richly-textured voice is once again up front in Watt’s glimmering landscape of sub-bass, sharp beats, half-lit synths and empty space, and as before, the result is the sound of a band comfortable with being both sonically contemporary, yet agelessly themselves.

Speaking about the band’s re-emergence and new album, Tracey says:

‘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’.

The pair recorded in secret at home and in a small riverside studio outside Bath with friend and engineer Bruno Ellingham. For the first two months, the artist name on the album files was simply TREN (Tracey and Ben), and early takes focussed on ambient sound montages and improvised spectral piano loops recorded by Ben on his iPhone at home during his enforced pandemic isolation – ideas which later blossomed into atmospheric tracks such as When You Mess Up and Interior Space.

Yet, as confidence grew, so did the pulse and rhythm of the album, culminating in the writing and programming of later songs, such as the new single Nothing Left To Loseand Caution To The Wind. Shot through with alternating hope, desperation and vivid flashbacks, the album’s lyrics – sometimes allusive, sometimes richly detailed, capture what it’s like to start again.

Ben explains: ‘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’.

The duo’s renewed studio partnership also led to the new album title. ‘After so much time apart professionally, there was both a friction and a natural spark in the studio when we began’, says Tracey. ‘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
Fuse
tracklist
Verve/Buzzin’ Fly Records

Nothing Left To Lose
Run a Red Light
Caution to the Wind
When You Mess Up
Time and Time Again
No One Knows We’re Dancing
Lost
Forever
Interior Space
Karaoke

Album credits:

Produced and arranged by Everything But The Girl
Tracey Thorn – lead vocals, backing vocals
Ben Watt – drum and sound programming, piano, synthesizers, electric guitar, backing vocals
Recorded and mixed by Bruno Ellingham at Riverside Studios, Bath
Additional iPhone recordings by Ben Watt | Additional percussion programming on Caution To The Wind, When You Mess Up and No One Knows We’re Dancing, and field recording of Druidstone Beach on Interior Space by Bruno Ellingham | Additional drum and synth programming on No One Knows We’re Dancing by Ewan Pearson
Mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios, London

Pre-order Fuse by Everything But The Girl HERE