Estelle Clifford: Music - Everything but the Girl, 'Fuse'

After 24 years, the electronic pop duo returns with a moving, handsome album that tells a sophisticated story about recapturing innocence. 

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. 

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