Everything But The Girl - Amplified Heart - Deluxe Edition (2 CD)

First released in June 1994, Amplified Heart is the seventh studio album from Everything But The Girl — the best-selling UK duo formed in 1982 by singer-writer-musicians Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt — and arrives in a new 31-track deluxe CD reissue edition featuring additional B-sides and extra tracks.

Amplified Heart went on to sell over a million copies and was acclaimed on its release for its candour and affecting intimacy (“The results are, to a song, high quality” MOJO; “Captures expertly the fragmentary confusing nature of emotional ruction” INDEPENDENT; “Their newest album, and possibly their best” NEW YORK TIMES). It also contains the original version of what was to become the band’s biggest hit, Missing.

If Todd Terry's famous house remix took Missing onto the world’s dance floors and global pop charts in 1995 (#2 on US Billboard Hot 100; #1 on US Billboard Hot 100 Airplay; #3 on the UK Top 40; #1 in Canada, Germany and Italy), the original version also remains a timeless classic and one that perhaps better reflects the enduring appeal of the album’s modern-retro hybrid of ardent folk-soul and scratchy electronica.

The genesis of Amplified Heart was anything but easy. Written in the aftermath of Watt’s harrowing near-death experience in 1992 from a rare auto-immune disease, the lyrics — written alternately by the duo — are raw unflinching stories of love and isolation in extremity.

To anchor the album’s heart, the pair turned in part to folk-rock legends Danny Thompson (double bass), Dave Mattacks (drums), and engineer Jerry Boys (Sandy Denny, REM), but also to electronic producer John Coxon (Spring Heel Jack, Spiritualized) to find the loops and dusty sounds that give the record much of its underlying atmosphere. There are cameo roles from Richard Thompson on electric guitar (25th December) and veteran string arranger Harry Robinson (I Don’t Understand Anything, Two Star).

Pitchfork awarded the album 8.6 in a 2019 reappraisal, noting the album’s enduring influence on artists that followed such as The xx and Beth Orton, and concluded “The duo’s spare, pensive style never sounded more fully realized than here.”

Mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios, the tracklist varies slightly from the last deluxe edition in 2013 with a smattering of newly-unearthed live recordings and a previously unreleased remix. The original artwork is newly laid out by John Gilsenan at I Want Design and features full lyrics and credits, and images from the period by fashion and documentary photographer Corinne Day and Richard Haughton.