Everything and the World: The Return of EBTG

If Everything But The Girl hadn’t been around since 1982—and if we hadn’t been around since 1982—we would have made the grave mistake of filing their 2023 album Fuse under “pandemic pop,” based on the first bars of opening track and first-released single “Nothing Left to Lose.” There’s an incubated, fully electronic sound hermetically sealed into a drum machine loop, almost demanding that you listen to it with headphones, in your personal headspace, just like the way we survived 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

But Tracey Thorn’s voice comes, thickened with age, powering through not three years—but three decades—of relative silence, and we realize it’s a voice we’ve waited for, for ages. We also understand why the sound is authentic and honest, because it’s her beloved Ben Watt behind the circuitry.

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By we, of course, I refer to those of us who grew up on EBTG’s music, through all the teenage sleepovers, fumbling date nights, and lonely club crawls of our comings of age. Other generations are welcome, of course, but need not apply.

The British duo seemed to uncannily keep pace with our selves. By the time we were at our most sociable, in college, they had fully stepped out of their English Jazz (Eden) and guitar pop (Love Not Money) phase and entered more audience-friendly territory with the larger and brighter sounds of orchestrated pop (Baby the Stars Shine Bright) and folk-jazz. As expected, they became a university favorite everywhere, and as predicted, their songs, easy to learn, easy to sing, became everyone’s date music. 

In 1994, a Todd Terry remix of their single “Missing” worked its way through the underground club scene in New York, pulling their music into a new sound. In the same year, the single “Protection,” a collaboration between Thorn and trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack, placed her voice on the frontline of a new horizon in the music broadly defined as “electronica”—whatever that meant. By the early ‘90s, electronic music had become a vast river of sound created in studios, clubs, and raves, a confusingly wide, but exhilarating front that ranged from hard-driving house to jazz-infused drum ‘n bass.

It was EBTG’s 1996 album Walking Wounded that presented, in nine songs, one of the richest displays of the possibilities of electronic pop. The duo seemed to have come out of incubation in the underground and brought along with them the real heavyweights from the scene. The result was an album that was startling in its freshness and fullness, delicate and considered with its beats but heavy with their trademark dourness and held-back drama.

1998’s Temperamental proved that their shift to a completely electronic sound was sure-footed.  Though the tracks sounded a bit thin and underproduced to some, what was clear was that they had been lured away from pop, both in their music and their public lives. After all, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt had lives to live and a family to mind. Temperamental would be their last album of the ‘90s—possibly forever.

Strangely, that was not such a great tragedy. Walking Wounded had so sharply etched a mark in the history of contemporary pop and electronic music that it was enough for a generation or two to live on. Part of the reason for this is that anyone listening to the album for the first time today could probably be fooled into thinking it had just been produced yesterday.

But then there’s Fuse, recorded in 2022—almost literally yesterday—and composed during the pandemic years by Ben and Tracey in their bedrooms and their living rooms.

Their reunification in music, as it were, performs just like any enduring couple’s conversation: it almost sounds as if they’ve picked up an important conversation from 24 years ago and calmly carried on with it. But Ben and Tracey are 60 now, and age, especially in the case of pop music, matters. Except for the rare flash of instances like this: they’re no longer tour-friendly pop stars, or even track-suited habitues of the club scene.

They’re just Ben and Tracey now, experiencing “the pleasure of making music together,” she said at the press launch of Fuse. That music just happens to be EBTG-music, cool to the ears but earnest and intimate. Like their previous two albums, you could have it playing in the background it all day and it wouldn’t hurt your focus, or you could zero in on a track and it would set your emotions off on a moment of tender introspection.

You seem so young again / I think that’s because you’re in pain / Don’t be so hard on yourself, Tracey sings in “When You Mess Up.” It’s something she couldn’t have written when she was 30—something we wouldn’t have felt, either.

In the one single press photo they’ve released, Ben and Tracey look startlingly grey, but reassuringly as forlorn as they were before. They’re also reassuringly still a couple, and bafflingly still making the loneliest songs you’ll ever hear in a club or a bar. Loneliness is part of their signature; you can hear the echo of it in the sound before you work out the lyrics and that’s why their music works so well. 

There is something more urgent and at the same time resigned in the loneliness of Fuse. Tracey’s voice, newfound to her and to us, comes from a deeper place, sublimely weathered and sounding a little wiser from age.

But maybe it’s not about her age, or our age—but about this age, the post-lockdown era, with its newly complicated considerations surrounding living and surviving. I lost my perfect job / I lost the plot / Then I just lost it, Tracey sings in “Lost.” It’s something a midday quiet quitter or a midnight doomscroller would sing to himself. It’s something all of us have said to ourselves, at some point, over the last lost years of our lives and our world.