Desire – “Love Is A Crime” (Feat. Mirage)

Chromatics are no more, but that doesn’t mean that Johnny Jewel is done with making icy, cinematic synthpop. Next month, Desire, the duo of Jewel and Megan Louise, will release Escape, their first album in well over a decade. We’ve already posted the single “Telling Me Lies,” and now Desire have teamed up with another long-dormant Johnny Jewel project for the new song “Love Is A Crime.”

As far as I can tell, Mirage hasn’t released anything since they had a song on the 2017 movie soundtrack Don’t Come Back From The Moon. “Love Is A Crime” teams Desire with Mirage. It’s an atmospheric swirl of electronic tics and vocodered vocals, and it summons that glamorously distant feeling that so many Johnny Jewel projects evoke. Desire co-directed the video with Talvi Faustmann, and it’s a hallucinatory tale of Megan Louise chasing Mirage through Joshua Tree. Check it out below.

Escape is out 5/3 on Italians Do It Better.