Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt on making and releasing 'Fuse,' the surprise EBTG album, after 24 years

Everything But the Girl (EBTG) just released "Fuse," a new album after 24 long years. The duo, comprised of husband and wife team Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn, sat down with a host of media from Southeast Asia over Zoom late last month to talk about it.

Below we pieced together their statements from the virtual presser so Ben and Tracey themselves can tell you about how "Fuse" came about. It's been edited it for brevity and clarity.

ON DECIDING TO MAKE AN ALBUM

Ben: I was forced to live in isolation. Our lockdown was quite severe. I think when we came out of it at the end, as things got back to normal, we looked at each other and asked, "now what?"

Tracey: We were trying to keep it very low-key and not put pressure in ourselves. Maybe even try and pretend to not be working on EBTG. We felt, it would make it such be a big deal and become quite inhibiting. We didn't even use the name EBTG at the start. We had the finals labeled TREN, for Tracy and Ben, so we could almost pretend it was just a side project.

We did a lot of pre-stuff at home. The first couple of days in the studio and we put lead vocals down, we just started getting excited again. At that point, we thought, 'it is a EBTG album, and therefore it's got to be good.'

At that point, we started to step up and started to embrace the challenge. It's exciting and possible and something we could do.

Ben: When we started the record, we started with a lot of atmospheric tracks, with no beats -- like interior space, when you mess up and the album is going in quite an atmospheric down tempo at the beginning. As our confidence grew, we started to introduce more tempo, more rhythm. I rediscovered a lot of the love I had for programming beats.

With this record, we were a bit nervous when we started. We'd worked solo for 20 years, we got used to making our own decisions and we worried if we got in a room together, we might end up falling out and it might not work.

But the collaboration suddenly felt like a release that we were able to share ideas with people, and share unfinished ideas and have someone finish them, which was a real difference when you're working solo.

A lot of the songs in this records were half-ideas one of us had and the other one would come in and express enthusiasm and write a section for it and we piece it together and it felt like a record made by the two of us.

ON NAMING THE ALBUM TITLE 'FUSE'

Tracey: Fuse, the word for us has two meanings. The idea of lighting a fuse and starting an explosion. Starting small which then took off.

And then the other meaning of Fuse is to fuse together. Two things coming together. When we thought of the title, we thought, it's a beautiful, simple one-word title that sums up those two aspects of the whole project.

ON THEIR FIRST SINGLE, 'NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE'

Ben: It picked up the kind of pace and the rhythm as I got into it. It's was the very last track we made for the album. We made "Caution to the wind" as the second to the last track and we thought we could go on further.

Musically, it seems to capture so much of the essence of our sound, particularly the sound we created in the 90s. But it injects rhythm and arrangement ideas that perhaps have happened since Temperamental. It has a feel for electronic music as it presents itself now. I think that beat, that two-step feel, the breakbeat feel, and the heavy vibrato, tremolo on the bass just seems to give it a contemporary flavor.

Tracey: It's got a real urgency. This urgent, desperate desire to connect. If you're going to come back with a track after 24 years, you want it to have an impact. You want it to be exciting. We were certain, "this is the first track."

Ben: It captures a kind of passion. We meant this. We weren't just doing it for fun, we wanted to make something good.

ON 'RUN THE RED LIGHT'

Tracey: It portrays the breadth of what we do, things people think we're good at.

Ben: It's oldest song on the record. I had old sketches I recorded on my iPhone and this is an old song I wrote some years ago. I was going to do on one of my solo projects, but I layed it to Tracey at the kitchen table thinking "this is going to be a disaster" and she liked it.

The lyric tries to capture something in that period on my life, when I was DJing every weekend. I would always run into people in clubs and clubland, who had big dreams. The little guy with the big dream. The guy who feels if he could just get one big break, and he could be the big guy. Passion, bravado, and vulnerability of someone perhaps who isn't going to succeed after all.

ON 'WHEN YOU MESS UP'

Tracey: This is probably the first one we wrote together for the new album. When we completed it, we looked at each other and said 'we've just written a song together. That's the first time we've done that in 22 years." That's quite momentous in itself.

It started as a little piano improvisation that Ben started during lockdown. He was playing improvisations and recording them. It's one of them.

It's really me talking to myself. Me giving advice of being forgiving when you mess up, or when you don't know what to do, or what's coming next. It's about being tolerant and forgiving of yourself.

ON RELEASING AN EBTG RECORD IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Tracey: Things have changed immeasurably. We are totally aware of the changes, streaming, social media how these things have an impact. It is a different world. there's no real comparison. The thing we noticed most striking is this is the first time we've released an EBTG record in the age of social media. So although we've done solo projects, they're in a low-level attention. We've released this and a lot of that has been happening in social media.

The morning "Nothing Left to Lose" was played on the radio, it went online straight away. Immediately, having this outpouring of reaction from people who were hearing it for the first time, it was really moving. We've never had that in our lives. In the past, we'd put out the record and the immediate reaction is silence. This was our first experience of the outpouring.

ON PERFORMING LIVE AS EBTG AGAIN

Tracy: We don't have plans. When we started this project, the agreement was we do understand we're just making a record. We're not trying to go back to the old days, taking the band on the road. It's not something we want to do for lots of reasons, there isn't one big reason. I don't have any urge to return to it.

Ben: Life has become a lot more complicated for me since the pandemic. I have an autoimmune condition and touring the world with something like that post-covid is not very easy for us. And I would hate in the position where we'd be playing at some arena somewhere and we'd have to cancel last-minute. It just seems something that would cause so much friction and unhappiness for a lot of people it doesn't seem like a risk worth taking.

From a creative point of view, performing live forces the artist to look backwards. Crowds always want the old stuff. They want you to play the hits, their favorites. While I respect that, it's not something we get a huge amount of pleasure from. It's not something that appeals to us. For us as artists, it's much more exciting to do something new. — LA, GMA Integrated News

Stream Fuse on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.