Everything But The Girl tell us about reflective new album ‘Blue Reservoir’ – inspired by the magic of Moth Club

Everything But The Girl have announced details of their new album ‘Blue Reservoir’, inspired by their residency shows at London’s legendary Moth Club. Check out new single ‘Young And Dumb’ below, along with our interview with the duo. READ MORE: Everything But The Girl – ‘Fuse’ review: how reunion albums should be done The indie-electronica icons surprised the world back in 2023 when they returned with the acclaimed ‘Fuse‘, their first new album in 24 years. The married couple – formed of singer Tracey Thorn and multi-instrumentalist Ben Watt, who previously released 10 albums before they downed tools as a musical unit in 2000 – shocked fans even more, when they then chose to finally return to the stage, performing intimate, stripped-back residency shows at the 300-capacity Moth Club in Hackney. It was the unique alchemy and atmosphere of those gigs that inspired the duo’s 12th album ‘Blue Reservoir’, which is announced today (Wednesday October 28) with launch single ‘Young And Dumb’. “Out of all the songs on the record, this felt like a good and immediate one,” Thorn told NME. “It’s a good, clear way of people grasping what we’re doing. The first thing you hear is a Spanish guitar playing on its own and you go, ‘OK, this isn’t ‘Fuse’.’ We wanted to make it a statement of intent. “The lyric is very direct. It’s about being in the place and time we’re in now, and having that feeling of wishing that you could go back in time but you can’t so you try to live your life with the same energy and passion that you had when you were young. That came out of the Moth gigs: us just accepting who we are, what we’re good at, where we’re at in our lives, what we’re able to do. We’re not doing big world tours but we can do this. We’re making a virtue out of that, really.” Watt agreed that this Latin-tinged vibe was “a really comfortable sound to go back to”. “Maybe ‘Fuse’ was a reinterpretation of something we pioneering in the ‘90s, but what we’re doing here is reconnecting with things we pioneered in the early ‘80s, in a way: that blend of folk, jazz, Brazilian, that little melting pot we put together in the early days,” he shared. “It felt really comfortable going back into that, it felt like us. It didn’t feel like we were putting on someone else’s hat.”Recommended Everything But The Girl, 2023. Credit: Edward Bishop Check out the rest of our interview with Thorn and Watt below, where they told us about returning to the music industry, their search for the modern, grappling with life and time on ‘Blue Reservoir’, and why we need to club venues like Moth Club “surviving and thriving”. NME: Hello Everything But The Girl. It’s been three years since we last spoke to announce ‘Fuse’. How was it getting back in the trenches after 24 years? Tracey Thorn: “It was amazing because we didn’t anticipate it for a long time. It came quite quickly and then before we knew it, we had a record. ‘Fuse’ was three years ago now, and even since then we’ve moved on somewhere else new. Having done that and made a record, which surprised people, we then returned to playing live which surprised people again. We’ve already moved on to a different place.” Ben Watt: “There was a lot happening in the run-up to ‘Fuse’, it just didn’t happen to be Everything But The Girl. There were Tracey’s books, solo projects and me running [label] Buzzin’ Fly – we were always busy, but hadn’t done anything as Everything But The Girl for a while.” We spoke last time about how many modern acts you’ve inspired like The xx, Jungle, Daughter, FKA Twigs and beyond, but what was it like to then be back among them with something quite contemporary itself? Watt: “We don’t really think about music like that.” Thorn: “We’re usually preoccupied with just doing our thing, which most artists are. You keep an eye on what other people are doing, and that’s interesting, but you have to stay quite single-minded and focussed on your own stuff. If you start getting too caught up in ideas of influence or status, then it skews you a bit. You have to try and put that out of your head and just ask, ‘Is this a good idea? Do we like this? Can we pursue this?’” Everything But The Girl live in 1994. Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty What conversations did you have around ‘Blue Reservoir’ in terms of what you wanted to do and where you felt the music taking you? Thorn: “The real starting point was us going back to playing live last year and doing these little gigs at The Moth Club. When we started, we just booked two shows having not played live together for 25 years. It was a big milestone. We thought those two would feel amazing, but it’s turned into a long-running residency and we’ve gone about 30 shows there now. “Just out of that, we reconnected with something that was there for us right from the beginning, which is the two of us in this really stripped-down form. Guitar and vocals were the basis of it with maybe adding other things like double bass, drums, percussion. “It was just earlier this year we had the idea that we could start writing something. People kept asking, ‘Why don’t you record the Moth shows?’ We thought, ‘Let’s just keep them in the room, they’re a live show, but if we do record something let’s set ourselves the challenge of writing something new that comes out of that live experience’.” Watt: “It was the intimacy of those shows that really took us by surprise, and just the connection. You’re so close to people in a venue like that.” Thorn: “And the simplicity. You weren’t on a great big stage, there’s not a lot of production, not loads of stuff that was programmed and complicated so that if it goes wrong the show collapses. You think, ‘There’s 200 people out there, we’re up here with a guitar, whatever happens we can play them some songs’. It’s infallible. We can’t be stopped! We can just do it.” Watt: “We realised that some of those small club sounds started really interesting us again. The idea of the trio, the small folk combo, the intimacy of Brazilian music, these things started to percolate in our minds again. These things seemed to be things that worked in that context so well. There’s no point in putting a four-on-the-floor kick drum down and doing a banger when you’re doing a gig that intimate. It actually puts a wall up in a way. In that context, it was just that this intimacy really works, so where can we find some music that helps us express that for a new set of songs?” Everything But The Girl. Credit: Edward Bishop You’d think that a Latin guitar record would have landed well a few months ago, but you’ve really Everything But The Girl-ed it up to something quite dark and wintry somehow… Watt: “Of course! We have to make it melancholy.” You shot the video for ‘Young And Dumb’ in Moth Club too. Beyond the intimacy, is there anything else in the bricks, mortar and soul of that venue that you love? Watt: “I love the booths down the side of the room. That gives it that slightly sleazy, port bar, jazz club kind of feel, which I really like when you look out into the room with the little lights on the tables. I like the people who run it. I like that when people turn up, it doesn’t even look like a club or venue. “You won’t believe where people have come from for these shows. Sometimes we talk to people in the queue and we’ve had people from San Francisco, Sao Paulo, someone flew in from Australia for the weekend. It’s really wonderful that it means that much to people and they’ll travel.” So you must have been quite invested in the venue’s battle against being torn down by developers for flats? Thorn: “Well, it’s in a better place than it was. Every night on stage we were telling people to sign the petition. They’ve won the first part of the battle, so fingers crossed that they save it. It was horrendous. After COVID we saw so many venues close down, and we just can’t afford to lose these grassroots places. Long may it survive and thrive.” Watt: “KOKO set a good precedent in saying, ‘Look, we’ve been here for a long time and you’re just building flats with a balcony looking where we’ve been. You can’t just step into a pre-existing business like this’. It’s the story of clubland that often more rundown and derelict areas get populated by artist types, then they slowly become desirable and get gentrified. Lofts go up and all those clubs and venues that had been making noise until 3am when people spilled out onto the streets were suddenly a problem. “I remember years ago when I was DJing at Plastic People. They eventually had to close down due to the horrendous pressure they got from flats that were going up.” I’ve heard three songs from the new album. Tell us first about ‘Scala’ – that’s like a whole play within a song. What’s going on there? Thorn: “That was a song where we had a version of it but the original music didn’t quite work so we almost shelved it, but we thought, ‘We cannot shelve these lyrics’. Ben re-wrote something and it really came together. I like that combination, but it’s got this mad Cuban vibe in the music and the lyric is about me as a teenager. It’s set in a world of teenagers hanging out, buying singles by The Smiths and The Cure, boys and girls trying to impress each other, then spending the night of their 19th birthday – as I did – on the floor of The Scala!” Watt: “As we were recording it, the band felt like a band in a little run-down club somewhere. It’s got that nocturnal vibe. It just felt right when we married the lyric with the music.” And the song ‘Forward’ with that lyric, “You have to go headlong into the dark, into the light, you cannot go back, too much to unpack”. That speaks to the band’s anti-nostalgia sentiment? Thorn: “Yes, and that’s going to be the opening track of the record. Opening an album with the message, ‘You have to go forward’, that’s quite a statement of intent. When you listen to the record as a whole, it starts with that line about having to move forward but then spends its time – as we all do – caught between your past, your present and your future. How do you live in your present, especially as you get older? How do you keep on the front foot and feeling energised about life? But you’re constantly in a dialogue with your past and your history. The record really is that. “‘Scala’ is obviously me in dialogue with my past, ‘Forward’ is me saying ‘You have to move on, you can’t go back’, and ‘Young And Dumb’ is going, ‘You’re living here now, you can’t go back to being young, you’ve got to live like you’re young’. There’s tension, and that comes from writing songs when you’re this age. You’re constantly having thoughts about temporality, where you exist in time, how much of your future there is, and how much your past stretches behind you. That’s a lot of the through line.” Looking to the future: at this stage of your career, is there any stone unturned you’d like to flip over or is there anything that remains on Everything But The Girl’s bucketlist? Watt: “We have never, ever thought about things in that way. We literally have an idea and then we go it.” Thorn: “And we never know what that will be. We didn’t know we were going to come back and do gigs at Moth Club. I remember sitting in a bar with Ben one night and we tried a bit of new music that wasn’t working and he said, ‘What are we going to do?’ so I replied, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, why don’t we just do some gigs then?’ We were like, ‘What? We don’t do gigs! Maybe we should…’” Watt: “We made some demos that were a bit rubbish long before the new stuff. When Tracy said she wanted to do some gigs, my jaw hit the floor because she hadn’t wanted to sing for such a long time.” Thorn: “Sometimes the mood just takes you.” Watt: “I’ll tell you what’s been really liberating about choosing this part: we could have gone into Royal Albert Hall or almost anywhere, but going into Moth Club has allowed us to just play what we want. We’re doing B-sides, we’re doing cover versions, we’re not playing songs that people would expect us to, and as a musician, that’s very liberating. We could easily go into an arena and do a tour with ‘What’s Missing’, all the ‘Walking Wounded’ hits, all the bangers. When we were doing that in the ‘90s, we lost the connection with people. You’re just going through an exercise tied to lighting cues, the setlist, and all sorts of things when you get to venues like that. “With the Moth, we can just do what we like. That’s where we’re at our happiest, perhaps.” View this post on Instagram Visit here to sign the petition to save Moth Club. ‘Blue Reservoir’ will be released on Friday February 19, 2027 on Buzzin’ Fly via Virgin Music Group. Check out the tracklist below, and pre-order it here. ‘Forward’ ‘Scala’ ‘Young and Dumb’ ‘Do What You Can’ ‘Christmas Gone’ ‘Courage Mon Brave’ ‘The Round and Round’ ‘Fork in the Road’ ‘Good Hope’ ‘The Great Unknown’ Everything But The Girl’s upcoming tour dates as Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn are below, with tickets to the 2027 shows on sale from 10am on Friday October 30 and available here. NOVEMBER 2026 29 – Union Chapel, London 30 – Union Chapel, London DECEMBER 2026 13 – Moth Club, London 14 – Moth Club, London 15 – Moth Club, London MAY 2027 21 – Union Chapel, London 22 – Union Chapel, London 25 – St George’s Bristol 26 – Albert Hall, Manchester