After years away, Miracle further consecrate their dark synthpop with ex machina themes that dance with reason in one hand and allure in the other.
Release date: June 26, 2026 | Relapse Records | Facebook | Bandcamp
I can’t even convey how long and how much I’ve been waiting for this moment. I’ve loved Miracle since their 2018 album, The Strife of Love in a Dream. I wrote off the idea of ever seeing a new album from them in recent years. ‘It was just a side project for a bit,’ I told myself. ‘It’s over now, hang it up.’ Well, I never said never, and you shouldn’t either, because clearly I am staring in the face of a new Miracle album, the duo making good on their name by delivering something when least expected.
Comprised of composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore and singer Daniel O’Sullivan, Miracle dole out the darker side of synthpop with a lot of accouterments that make it sparkle and gleam immensely, just as The Black Queen‘s Fever Daydream LP did in 2016, especially in the wake of the synthwave resurgence of the 2010s that hasn’t aged very well overall. It’s real chills-inducing stuff built on the foundation the ’80s and even ’70s set with some krautrock and kosmische touches. With The Living Likeness of My Electric Daemon, the formula is well intact, its focus and expanded musical lilt makes it both more approachable and reflective of the times.
The key tenet of this album is, as revealed by its Bandcamp description, ‘navigating illusion and embodiment, ecstasy and annihilation, devotion and domination, the ancient and the algorithmic. The electric daemon is both an inner familiar and an externalized intelligence: the soul in the machine and the machine in the soul.‘ In service to this, there are many allusions to the divine or primal juxtaposed to the black mirror of technology, not to compare directly, but to ask if we are becoming its living likeness just as it is said that we are made in the image of God. There’s no better, more striking image to illustrate this than Mark Titchner‘s cover art for the album that riffs on Michelangelo‘s legendary Pietà statue, encasing the martyred Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene in cybernetic frames. Lots to unpack there, as there tends to be with well-implemented biblical imagery.
Throughout The Living Likeness of My Electric Daemon, Miracle can be coy as to their exact coordinates on this issue. I suppose it’s for the best – their desire to make people think about this intersection and draw their own conclusions likely outweighed any outright stance, as is true for most artists. Call it my bias, but I still can’t help but read this album’s prose as a critique of where we’re at and how we got here. Imagery is called forth that can only be read as such to me. For example, I read “The Eye” as an interrogation on the surveillance state and how we lost the plot on technology’s encroachment in our personal lives and constant violation of privacy via prisons of our own making and overly complacent acceptance of terms of use written by people who probably think Palantir is a great idea (‘Instil the eye in everything/’Til all is lost‘). There’s something to be said for how sweet and cool this song sounds with synth melodies light like birdsong, similar to how well surveillance technology and less privacy rights are sold to us under the guise of personal protection or enhancing our lives.
“Ambrosia” sonically is one of the best songs I’ve heard this year. Bass rhythms practically hammer out a pleasure map of notes and the fried synths are warm, both complementing rapturous vocals from O’Sullivan. The lyrics reference sacred processes of creation on a biological, but also spiritual level. To me, this most closely represents how man makes machine, especially AI, perhaps with the dream of omniscient power in order to serve us, but very specific word usage carries an incredibly important and unavoidable double meaning:
‘The cross can twist
Into materialistic
Dianoetic circles
Sowing gold in souls
Embedding souls in bodies
The sensible fabricator‘
“The Charnal Pit” has a wonderful pulse to it, given dramatic touches like the sword unsheathing sound when O’Sullivan sings in his perfectly enunciated British affectation about a figure in a gold mask ‘wielding a silver liquid sword‘ (I just heard GZA stand up at attention). It’s worth noting that the whole second half of The Living Likeness of My Electric Daemon is a little more conventionally built. Production feels more familiar and affable to the casual listener that may have an affinity for this style of electronic pop. The first half was more esoteric and transcendental by nature as it focused on the more theoretical and spiritual aspects of thought, form, and function when it comes to creation and existence. The second half is more contemporary and literal, the reaping of the sowing of the first half’s experimentation and, as I call it, hubris.
I don’t wanna be one of those dudes that’s like, ‘man, they left a lot of bread crumbs on this album, I can see what they were going for’ and all that because that is borderline psychotic and I do concede that my bias is likely driving a lot of this. I also think it speaks to how this album was constructed, not from a centrist standpoint where you can cleanly read things in either direction, but from a consideration that everyone from the tech bro to the eco-empathetic would-be Luddite should take to heart. This album was written and recorded from 2019 to 2025 which adds an element of forming this art under the very raw conditions of stark and bleak acceleration of AI, the nuking of personal privacy, and what is effectively livestreaming genocides across the world with little in the way of measurable pushback no matter how many dead kids we see. You can feel it, you can hear it. Just because the music can come off as mechanically sterile and power dance floors doesn’t mean there isn’t real meaning under it all, and Miracle have succeeded in proving that assertion right.
The Living Likeness of My Electric Daemon is made up of every aspect of the technology it uses as a springboard. The wonders of it, the analogs to humans it carries, and how we’ve lost a lot of life and freedom to it. It does not preach or moralize, but it is also harrowingly honest about reality, trading heavy-handedness for an agile poeticism that doesn’t feel like a cop out or needless bloating around the core at hand. I have to say I underestimated Miracle‘s ability to return with such a powerhouse and thinker of a record, its thematic reasons for existing almost eclipsing the music itself which is the real reason why I became a fan in the first place. That said, they play hand-in-hand for a reason, just like man does with machine and all its benefits and woes. This is a complex endeavor, but I’m so thankful for it. You will not hear another synthpop album like this all year.
