Written and recorded between London and New York from 2019 to 2025, The Living Likeness Of My Electric Daemon finds MIRACLE, the duo of Steve Moore and Daniel O’Sullivan, at their most distilled and uncompromising.
Mixed by Moore and mastered by James Plotkin, the album unfolds as a ten-part song cycle 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. The record asks not whether technology is sentient, but whether we are becoming its living likeness.
The album’s artwork, created by Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner, presents a cybernetic mutation of the classical Pietà: Madonna and Jesus are rendered in rubbery black PVC-like material, segmented and articulated with zips, evoking devotion and corporeal fragility refracted through a synthetic, technological lens.
Musically, the album deepens MIRACLE’s singular synthesis of devotional pop, kosmische propulsion and gothic minimalism. Moore’s lattice of analogue and digital synthesisers pulses and corrodes in equal measure. O’Sullivan’s voice moves between incantation and intimacy, hymnal and wounded.
Tracks like “Ambrosia” sets a devotional tone, steeped in alchemical and cellular imagery, where spirit is embedded in matter and matter longs for transfiguration. “Consolamentum Day” draws on the annihilation of the Cathars in southern France, reframing medieval persecution as a recurring psychic event. On “Fluid Window,” with guest vocals by Rose Keeler-Schaffeler (KEEL-HER), the apple becomes touchscreen icon. The Living Likeness Of My Electric Daemon invokes the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, refracted through the black mirror of the 21st century.
If earlier releases suggested a haunted jukebox, The Living Likeness Of My Electric Daemon feels like a chapel wired directly into a mainframe.