Tracey's voice? She just opened her mouth and that's what came out. As a teenager, she wanted to be Patti Smith. But tonally she knew that her voice was not appropriate for funk stuff. So she's always been a fan of the direct, flat delivery."

So says Ben Watt, one half of Everything But the Girl, about a dominant female voice in today's pop music, Tracey Thorn. The voice that makes the duo's new CD, Walking Wounded (Atlantic), walk is exactly what he says it is. Straight ahead, diction unaffected, rhythmically disengaged -- a voice ostensibly in repose and not in need of the trickery, fuss, and hurry that props up so many rock-band mouths. Watt accepts the Tracey Thorn difference. "We've always been a non-rock band."

Which is true. Back before 1994's Amplified Heart and its hot single "Missing" remade Everything But the Girl's career, the duo recorded jazzy ballads, stand-still show tunes, and neo-trad uptempo numbers -- songs defiantly out of place in a guitar-driven radio culture. The group found a lasting audience, in England at least, among a well-dressed crowd lacking money but not a taste for supper-club songs with a rhythmically dandified dignity. "Tracey's always liked Dusty Springfield records," says Watt. "The kind of restrictions she knows her voice has. She works within a quite limited set of parameters."

But either dandified ballads didn't do justice to Thorn's limited parameters or else the audience forsook them, for when Amplified Heart first appeared the duo were all but played out. Then "Missing" happened. "It's been like a little time bomb," says Watt. "It's reactivated a lot of people who'd stopped listening to us. As well as bringing us a whole new audience. Maybe it tapped a kind of latent appeal we've had to lapsed fans."

But why? "Missing" was house music -- not exactly the genre best qualified to win someone a huge pop hit. The version that hit was a remix, by Todd Terry, a New York-based club DJ and remix wizard who, like Everything But the Girl, had suffered from audience tune-out.

"We were doing several different remixes of the song with different DJs. It was Rich Cristina at Atlantic who suggested Todd," says Watt. "At first I thought his mix was too conservative, but there was a plain rawness to the music, a direct appeal but nothing too extreme."

Actually, the rawness in Terry's version of "Missing" was twofold: the melodic rumble of his beat cutting against the grain of Thorn's restrained horniness. The steadiness of Terry's tempo seemed to rush Thorn's voice -- listless in the original, full-CD version -- upward, toward soprano, a dramatic if subtle distortion that recalled the same melodic effect in David Morales's remix of U2's "Lemon." Perhaps the nearness to "Lemon" explains how the "Missing" remix conquered radio and clubland both, a rare event.

No surprise that house style underpins all of Walking Wounded. From "Before Today" and "Single" to "The Heart Remains a Child" and "Big Deal," its songs move darkly, deeply, through an emotional world of searching and regret. Terry, too, returns with a remix of "Wrong," the CD's steadiest song, and this remix has moved directly into the radio spot "Missing" had occupied, partly because despite the success of "Missing," no outfit (and no other remixer) has come up with anything else like it -- no tightly constrained rhythm song of shame and loss in the presence of passion. The CD also indulges the love Watt and Thorn have for urban folk (the Suzanne Vega-ish "Mirrorball") and their appreciation, as London natives, for the Pet Shop Boys' big-city identity juggling ("Flipside").

But most of all, Walking Wounded reflects what happened to Watt personally. In 1993 he became ill with Churg-Strauss Disease, "which has had only 30 or 40 cases reported. I now live with an illness which took a big chunk out of me. I almost died. I still can't digest properly. I was 170 pounds, now I'm 126. A skinny guy. It really did affect the music in a big way. It made me capitalize on the discontent with the music I'd done. Now was the time to reinvent the band, strip away all the production values of the '80s, go back to the core sound of our band, adopt the sound of club culture. All this propelled us with a new energy."

To some, Thorn's repetitious apologetics in "Wrong" revisit the sound of Sade turning her back, being sultry. Watt both rejects and adopts the comparison. "Sade hasn't moved with the times. She has her niche. In fact, we predate Sade."

They've survived her too.