When Ben Watt was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease, he made two albums with his wife, Tracey Thorn, that wore the couple’s trauma on their sleeves: Amplified Heart arrived in 1994 and Walking Wounded two years later. The last album that Everything But the Girl wrote together was equally transparent, although it spoke to a different strain of dissociation. Temperamental, released in 1999, came after the unassuming British indie duo had balked at the fame sprung on them by Todd Terry’s remix of their 1994 track “Missing,” which went on to define the club-spiked sound of the late-’90s and led to them declining an invitation to open for a U2 stadium tour. Its pessimistic lyrics spoke of alienation not just from other people, but from any sense of the past or the future. “And you say, ‘Think of the old days,’” Thorn sang on “The Future of the Future (Stay Gold),” the swirling house collaboration with Deep Dish that closed the album. “‘We could have them back again’/Well I thought about the old days/They’ll go bad like they did then.”
The band called it quits and dedicated themselves to home life, raising three kids. Watt founded the dance label Buzzin’ Fly and released solo music; Thorn also made albums and wrote several brilliant books on her life in music and its inspirations. While they offered each other practical creative assistance, their core collaboration was over. Curiously, it returned during another period of alienation. After the pair lived through an extreme version of the pandemic that required them to stringently self-isolate owing to Watt’s illness, Thorn proposed a reboot of EBTG, worried that they might one day realize they had left it too late. Once she persuaded Watt, they approached the project so tentatively that they hastened to call it EBTG, crediting the song files to TREN—Tracey and Ben. They announced the finished album in similarly low-key fashion: “Just thought you’d like to know that Ben and I have made a new Everything But the Girl album,” Thorn tweeted. “It’ll be out next spring.” She went out for dinner and returned to thousands of retweets.
Considering the circumstances of its creation, it’s not surprising that Fuse is an album that craves connection. It’s as fearful as Temperamental, but harbors none of its cynicism. “Kiss me while the world decays,” Thorn sings on the dubstep-haunted opener “Nothing Left to Lose,” and no other voice could brim so affectingly with anguish and urgency. A deep, desperate bond with someone else, she stresses on “Forever,” might be the only bulwark against the “cruelty” and “scheming” of our mendacious times. The warmth of her vocals and the relative chilliness of the glitchy, cavernous production suggest the scope of the distance they need to breach. But unlike the year-zero mentality of its predecessor, Watt and Thorn also urge maintaining ties to the past, drawing on nostalgic vignettes from their clubbing days at the blissfully ignorant end of the ’90s, as well as the wisdom afforded them by the subsequent decades.
EBTG has never been burdened by its history; they’re more inclined to ditch it from album to album, jumping between bossa nova and lite jazz to jangly indie, rousing ’60s orchestrations, soul, and drum’n’bass. But on Fuse, the duo pick up at least in the spirit of where they left off, keeping their connection to contemporary club culture alive. While the stories of Croydon boys, “girls and night-off waiters” on “No One Knows We’re Dancing” hark back to a Sunday daytime club that Watt ran in 1999, its wistful euphoria and sense of starry-eyed sanctuary dovetail with today’s dancefloors. The serrated “Nothing Left to Lose” evokes “Katy on a Mission” for a corporate London now hollowed of promise; “Caution to the Wind” is an anxious but devotional sad banger with a chorus that feels as if it’s existed forever (European listeners, however, may be distracted by a synth refrain that sounds annoyingly like the announcement chime in Paris train stations); “Forever” is a gamelan-dappled Balearic sunset, albeit one viewed with a giant lump in the throat.
Although the tone can get a little one-note, this personal and cultural lineage deepens the poignancy of Fuse, in which Thorn and Watt broadly consider what we lose and hold on to over the course of a lifetime. There are the clear griefs—“Lost,” a resting heartbeat of a song that flares with glass-rim glimmer, touches on the death of Thorn’s mother, and with her the dissolution of a worldview—but also more existential ones, often conveyed by messing with the fabric of Thorn’s fabled voice. Buried deep in the backdrop of that song, she becomes a barely audible processed burble, a shadow self urging: “Stop hiding after all these years/That front you put on isn’t fooling anyone.” She considers other ways one’s sense of self might be stolen: The alien “Interior Space” seems to touch on going through menopause—“And no I don’t bleed/And yes I am freed/But what is that worth?/Are we all about birth?”—and Thorn’s voice is pitched to sound distorted, desiccated, masculine even. On “When You Mess Up,” a gorgeous, spare piano devotional, a lavishly tender Thorn urges someone to stop giving themselves such a hard time but not to make light of their pain. Then, her voice becomes robotic as she sings, “In a world of micro-aggressions/Little human transgressions/Forgive yourself,” embodying, perhaps, how dehumanizing contemporary discourse can be.
As with EBTG’s original pivot, the appeal of dance music is the vast amount of space it leaves for Thorn’s voice, an instrument that’s only grown more magnetic with age. If everything is already in tatters, rather than second-guess yourself, she dares us to take a chance: the lovers in “Run a Red Light,” elbowing their way into the in-crowd by possibly nefarious means, seem high on hubris, but Thorn sings it with such seduction that you understand why they’re chancing it. “Time and Time Again” chronicles a woman finally leaving a cheating ex and taking her chance with a lover (though the somewhat drab melody undersells it).
The album ends with “Karaoke,” a contemplation by famous non-performer Thorn on what it means to sing, to take a risk at connection. It’s a glowing slow dance with herself, a call and response between an angelic chorus asking whether she sings to “heal the brokenhearted” or “get the party started,” and Thorn’s fulsome responses: “Oh you know I do … And I love that too.” Perhaps that’s what EBTG’s perspective has afforded them—to recognize how easily we can get in the way of life’s moments of innocence. Like Fuse, they’re rare.
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