Everything But The Girl have today revealed their new track No One Knows We’re Dancing and its accompanying lyric video. No One Knows We’re Dancing is taken from the duo’s upcoming new album Fuse, out this Friday, 21 April and follows recent releases Run A Red Light, Caution To The Wind and Nothing Left To Lose. The album’s previous tracks have received a great reception at press (‘Each new song from Everything But The Girl is something to be cherished‘ – Clash; ‘Real heft, as well as a kind of lived-in ease’ – Pitchfork); at radio (two songs on the BBC 6 Music A-List Playlist); and at editorial playlists (New Music Friday, All New Indie, The Other List, Loops).
Speaking about No One Knows We’re Dancing, Tracey says:
“I think we all missed the communality of nightlife and going out during the pandemic. The song is a eulogy to the heyday of packed Sunday clubs – the faces, the secret life, the clubs where Ben DJ’d in the early 2000s.“
“The tempo is deliberately dreamlike,” adds Ben. “Slowed-down disco, like a memory. We asked producer-DJ Ewan Pearson to add some body to the groove and he sprinkles some delicious extra synth lines and thickens the Italo-flavoured drums.”
Written and produced by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn over the spring-summer of 2022, Fuse is a modern take on the lustrous electronic soul the band first pioneered in the mid-90s. Thorn’s affecting and richly-textured voice is once again up front in Watt’s glimmering landscape of sub-bass, sharp beats, half-lit synths and empty space, and as before, the result is the sound of a band comfortable with being both sonically contemporary, yet agelessly themselves.
The pair recorded in secret at home and in a small riverside studio outside Bath with friend and engineer Bruno Ellingham. For the first two months, the artist name on the album files was simply TREN (Tracey and Ben), and early takes focussed on ambient sound montages and improvised spectral piano loops recorded by Ben on his iPhone at home during his enforced pandemic isolation – ideas which later blossomed into atmospheric tracks such as When You Mess Up and Interior Space.
Everything But The Girl broke through on the UK indie scene in 1982 with a stark jazz-folk cover of Cole Porter’s Night and Day. They then released a string of UK gold albums throughout the 80s, experimenting with jazz, guitar pop, orchestral wall-of-sound and drum-machine soul. After Watt’s near-death experience from a rare auto-immune condition in 1992, the pair returned unbowed with the million-selling ardent folktronica of Amplified Heart in 1994. It includes their biggest hit, Missing, after New York DJ-producer Todd Terry’s remix unexpectedly made the leap from heavy club play to global radio success (Number 2 US Hot 100; Number 3 UK Top 40). The sparkling Walking Wounded – emotional songs brimming with ideas from the mid 90s electronic scene – followed in 1996 (Number 4 UK Album Chart). Spawning four UK Top 40 hits, the record became the band’s first platinum selling album. After their final show at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, the pair chose to quit Everything But The Girl on a high.
Everything But The Girl’s new track No One Knows We’re Dancing is out now and the new album Fuse is out this Friday, 21 April.
