‘The best vocal I’ve heard in years on a dance song’—Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding reconvene for ‘Miracle’

by: Rachel Narozniak Mar 10, 2023

Nine years after their last outing (2014’s “Outside”) and 11 years after their first (2012’s “I Need Your Love”), Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding are back. And given the affirming success of their earlier efforts—which remain highlights of dance music’s commercial boom—that Harris and Goulding are once again aligning their names in the credits is less of a “Miracle” and more of a natural evolution.

It’s immediately clear that, stylistically, “Miracle” stands apart from both “Outside” and “I Need Your Love.” The diversion, Harris disclosed in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1’s New Music Daily, stems from his desire to hold space for trance sound in a way and to an extent that he never had:

“I’ve done the trancey sounding things before, but I’ve never been this fast, so it feels good. When I started making music, I was 14. It was 1998, and ’98, ’99, 2000, and 2001 was for me kind of [a] formative trance and house era. So what I did was just take bits from that and put it in a new context. But this time, I thought maybe I’ll just try and maybe more recreate something that could be from back then.”

A time machine in its own right, “Miracle” authentically but also unsurprisingly (this is Calvin Harris we’re talking about, after all) transports listeners to an idyllic raveland of decades past, offering a heady hit of serotonin that’s made all the more potent by Goulding’s electromagnetic vocals, captured in a 900-year-old church with acoustics of which singer-songwriters and producers alike could only dream. “It’s like absolute gold, the best vocal I’ve heard in years on a dance song,” says Harris. Indeed, it’ll glint among the mountains enclosing Indio Valley next month, where it’ll be a flashpoint of Harris’ headline set at Coachella, with (attendees, cross your fingers) or without a live performance from Goulding herself.