Introducing: Small Miracles

With their new single ‘YOU KNOW’, Cardiff’s theatrical art-rock outfit SMALL MIRACLES take a dramatic left-turn—from the punk-fuelled chaos of ‘Bisexual Panic’ to a glam-soaked elegy about grief, self-image, and emotional déjà vu. Laced with shimmering synths, swooning guitars, and Finn Fatale’s wounded croon, it’s a bittersweet anthem for anyone who’s ever tried to outrun their own feelings in heels and eyeliner.

Ahead of their debut album ‘A Human Connection’, we sat down with the band to talk reinvention, vulnerability, and why heartbreak sometimes hits hardest under stage lights.

‘You Know’ shows a more melancholic, shimmering side to the band — what inspired the shift in tone after the raw energy of ‘Bisexual Panic’?

Bisexual Panic was actually the first song from the album that we wrote, before we even really knew we were writing an album. As we got deeper into the process I think we started looking for those more melodic, melancholic hooks to balance out the heavier moments in the album. I think we actually leaned into that brightness more than I expected while we were writing. The rest of the album is (largely) more tonally similar to You Know than to BSP.  I think that will surprise people who have been following us for a while. 

You’ve described the chorus as “desperate” and “repeated like you’ve run out of words” — was that emotional urgency something you felt during the writing process, or did it emerge in the studio?

I think there's a real breathlessness to 'You Know' which I really like. Maybe it's because we recorded it live and played it much faster than we had demoed. I felt sorry for Steve's hands in the solo! The song came about really quickly actually - similarly to BSP we didn't want to overthink it too much. It's mostly what we wrote in the room bar a bit of a change in the bridge to give it that feeling of expansion. I wrote the lyrics on my walk to work one day and never changed them - it just felt right. 

There’s a real mix of genres in your sound — from glam rock to punk to alt-pop. How do you balance these influences without losing your identity as a band?

I think we try not to box ourselves in too much. We write all our songs together live in the room so we try to just play what's there rather than say ' let's try to write a punk song ' - it feels very reactionary and it's a fun process. The album is very eclectic, I think because we are all songwriters in our own right and come from very different musical backgrounds. We have different tastes so the music becomes a bit of an amalgamation of all these different ideas. We all have a clear voice on our instruments and we just try and stay true to that - I think that helps maintain our collective voice as a band. It’s best to let it flow and not force it. 

The new album’s called A Human Connection. What kinds of connections — personal, political, emotional — are you exploring on this record?

I think it's an album about love, passion and compassion in different forms. Connection is such a broad theme that we tried to approach it from a lot of different angles - zooming in and out from personal, to interpersonal, to societal, to human. Creating the record whilst witnessing a genocide obviously had a big impact, and I think the waves of intense connection and disconnection in these scary times is also a big theme of the album. On an interpersonal level it's a lot about community and building queer community, and how society responds to that. It's about loving your friends and missing them when they're not around. On a personal level, it's about learning to love yourself even when certain parts of society are (loudly) telling you not to. There's a lot of layers.