Fuse

It’s an album that manages to be different from anything they’ve recorded before yet perfectly in keeping with their past: a comeback worth waiting for.

Like all of the group’s recordings, the songs transcend the sound, and “Fuse” finds this veteran group as vital as ever.

One of the best albums Everything But The Girl have put their name against. A rich, atmospheric song cycle, it has the emotional heft of The Blue Nile and the production nous of Massive Attack. In the end, it could only be Everything But The Girl.

Ben Watt’s restrained piano and taut, anxiety-laden synths hang back so Thorn can carry the weight. She’s more than up to the task – her voice now fuller, deeper, enriched by experience, and perfectly suited to narrations about seeking light in the darkness.

The 60-year-old producer has clearly been keeping an aficionado’s ear on developments in digital electronica, and there is nothing particularly retro or dated about this comeback. Thorn’s voice has a timelessness that will always sound contemporary. She never strains or overemotes but lets her instinct for elegant melody and the understated intelligence of her lyrics carry the dramatic weight.

Fuse is nowhere near as club-friendly or single-driven as the stacked-with-hits Walking Wounded and Temperamental, but it contains the most adventurous production EBTG have ever attempted, showing that the duo haven't lost their touch for pairing up-to-date music with relevant, affecting subject matter.

‘Fuse’, their first album since 1999, is precisely that: the blueprint for any alt-leaning electronic act in the pop space.

If you don’t pay attention, it’s harmless background fluff, yet if you concentrate there are mysteries and subtleties to discover that demand repeat listens.

No more the quieter introspection and reflection of solo tracks like Hormones or Fever Dream – here Thorn and Watt are a combined force, capturing the giddy euphoria and release of the club experience.

Fuse picks up right where Temperamental stopped, as if they’re hitting play on a cassette they’ve kept on pause for 24 years. But they keep it fresh, using the latest digital effects to warp, filter, mutate Thorn’s voice into a deeper, more dolorous instrument. That suits the adult tone of the songs.

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.

While most of the songs on Fuse have sharp electronic edges, a soulful ballad such as ‘Run A Red Light’ isn’t going to scare Radio 2. Nevertheless, as the album unfolds, it becomes clear this isn’t EBTG simply revisiting past glories, but cautiously experimenting, and perhaps hinting at where they might go if they make more albums.