Everything but the Girl’s ‘electric’ album, 1996’s Walking Wounded, was a successful fusion of electronic music and high-quality pop songwriting, delivered by a singer gifted with a beautiful voice as well as a talent for clever/wry/heart-wrenching lyrics. The sequenced basslines, electronic beats, sampled loops and synth programming of club genres like house, drum & bass and trip hop/downtempo replaced EBTG’s more traditional instrumentation and style, giving their songs a futurist sheen and propulsive drive. The contrast between Thorn’s soft, mournful, restrained vocals, the aches of heartbreak revealed in every tiny crack in her contralto, and the backdrop of digital beats and synthetic instrumentation achieved a sophisticated sense of late-night intimacy, a simmering, nocturnal low-level intensity that hangs over the whole album.

– Harold Heath