Four tracks from the album were released as singles, including the drum and bass-influenced "Walking Wounded" and the house-influenced "Wrong", which became top ten hits on the UK Singles Chart, as well as the downtempo track "Single", which set Tracey Thorn's emotionally direct vocal against breakbeats, organ and strings,[1] and "Before Today". The album received critical praise, voted as the 12th-best album of the year in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll.[2]
Composition
According to Pitchfork's Ruth Saxelby, Walking Wounded draws on downtempo, drum and bass, and trip hop music, "compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format".[3]AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that the album is informed musically by trip hop and techno, albeit eschewing the "free-form song structures" traditionally associated with those genres.[4]Treble writer Adam Blyweiss viewed it as a refinement of Everything but the Girl's earlier sophisti-pop sound that "replaced many of the duo's acoustics with reasonable digital facsimiles".[5]
Walking Wounded marked a change in the duo's approach to writing songs. Ben Watt produced various instrumental tracks, while Tracey Thorn wrote lyrics after listening to the completed tracks.[6] In producing the tracks, Watt utilised samples from "unusual" sources;[6] the song "Single", for instance, sampled Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" and Stan Tracey's "Starless and Bible Black".[7] Thorn later recalled: "We really believed in ourselves and that comes across in the sound. We'd finally got to the point where we realised what our strength was: the softness and warmth of my voice against urban beats; the warm and cold, the soft and hard contrast. We got it perfect on this record; it was our pop triumph."[6]
Release
Walking Wounded was released on 6 May 1996 by Virgin Records in Europe,[8] and on 21 May 1996 by Atlantic Records in the United States.[9] It reached number four on the UK Albums Chart, becoming the duo's highest-charting album in the United Kingdom until 2023's Fuse,[10] and peaked at number 37 on the US Billboard 200.[11] Four singles were released from Walking Wounded: "Walking Wounded" on 8 April 1996,[12] "Wrong" on 17 June 1996,[13] "Single" on 23 September 1996,[14] and "Before Today" on 17 February 1997.[15] By February 1997, the album had sold 750,000 copies worldwide, according to Billboard.[16] It went on to sell over 1,300,000 copies worldwide.[17]
Walking Wounded was reissued by Edsel Records as a two-disc deluxe set on 4 September 2015.[18] On 8 November 2019, the album was re-released on vinyl by Buzzin' Fly Records.[19]
Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Jim Farber hailed the fusion of electronic and pop styles on Walking Wounded as "groundbreaking" and "at once abstract and immediate, untamed and accessible", while also crediting the "psychological resonance" of the lyrics for "putting EBTG way above the campiness of most neo-lounge acts."[21] Johnny Huston of Spin found that the album's songs are rooted in a "messy intimacy" uncommon in pop music, and that Everything but the Girl's balancing of "tradition and experimentation" and "softness and bite" makes Walking Wounded "more interesting" than the purely instrumental work of the duo's collaborators.[28] In The Guardian, Sheryl Garratt said that the duo had "intelligently" incorporated light drum and bass elements into their sound on an album she called "more a gentle updating" than "a reinvention".[22] Andy Crysell was more ambivalent in NME, expressing disappointment that the record did not constitute an "all-out conversion" to electronic music, although finding its songs "well-crafted and no doubt spectacularly meaningful".[24]
In his retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that Everything but the Girl, being "at its core... a pop group", had in a sense "dilute[d]" trip hop and techno by adhering to pop song structures on Walking Wounded, yet they "found a way around that by seamlessly incorporating the rhythms into carefully crafted songs."[4] For Pitchfork, Ruth Saxelby discussed Walking Wounded in context with the rest of the group's oeuvre:
Each Everything but the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt's individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back. They shared their knottiest feelings, created dialogue with skeletal new sounds, and made the record in a much more insular way than they ever had previously. Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band's adult contemporaries (Bristol drum 'n' bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up).[3]
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