Tracklist
01. Nothing Left To Lose
3:4402. Run A Red Light
3:3903. Caution To The Wind
4:0604. When You Mess Up
3:4805. Time And Time Again
2:5106. No One Knows We're Dancing
4:0907. Lost
3:35
08. Forever
3:4109. Interior Space
2:2410. Karaoke
3:51Tracey Thorn and
Ben Watt put their duo
Everything But the Girl on hold in 1999, at the height of their success, right after releasing Temperamental. What came out was FUSE, the duo's first album in 25 years, that is pretty much everything you could want from a EBTG record in 2023. They have covered a lot of musical ground over the last 40 years, from bossa nova to Sophistipop to cutting edge electronic music, but they basically pick up where Temperamental left off. Almost entirely electronic and in line with everything they've done before, the album manages to find new paths to explore without ever falling into "How do you do, fellow kids" territory.
"Nothing Left to Lose" announces their elegant return with a skipping, two-step beat, pulsing sub-bass and, like on Walking Wounded and Temperamental, Thorn's still-spectacular voice sitting perfectly in the middle of the spectrum. "Kiss me while the world decays," she sings in the chorus, sounding as wonderfully smoky and dolorous as ever, "Kiss me while the music plays." As Watt has noted, pathos and euphoria is key to so much great dance music, and few do it so naturally as Everything But the Girl. This is another stunner — though Four Tet's remix might be better.