Making a comeback record can be daunting. As decades pass since a beloved artist’s last release, the weight of expectations might continue to grow. Fortunately, the boundary-pushing pop duo Everything But the Girl – whose first album in 20 years, Fuse, released April 21st – has found a way around all the madness: They denied what they were doing until it was unavoidable.

“We started it in this spirit of we’re not really making an Everything But the Girl album,” vocalist Tracy Thorn tells Consequence. “We’re playing around with doing some music together. If it doesn’t work, we’re never going to tell anyone – and we didn’t tell anyone pretty much until we’d actually finished.”

Thorn, along with her long-time creative partner and husband Ben Watt, took the Voldemort approach, finding it best to keep the notion of what they might be doing unspoken. As Watt tells it, the goal was never to make the long-awaited Everything But the Girl comeback, it was just to exercise some creative intuition.

“It’s something that didn’t really strike us until we got started and then we sort of realized, ‘Oh, my God, it’s becoming Everything But the Girl and we’re not even really trying,’” he says.

And become Everything But the Girl it did. As soon as Thorn’s iconic voice struts over the propulsive electronic beat of Fuse’s first track “Nothing Left To Lose,” you can’t imagine it being anyone other than Everything But the Girl.

The album’s connection to the band’s past runs deeper than surface-level sonics, though. Anyone could attempt to replicate the aesthetic of their most celebrated work, and, in fact, many others have in their two-decade-long absence. It’s the willingness to expand upon what they’ve done before that makes it so quintessentially Everything But the Girl. It sounds like Everything But the Girl because, well, it is, but it’s also intensely modern.