There are albums that age gracefully, like wine. Then there are albums that age like club walls: layered with memories, sweat-stained, and still vibrating faintly if you press your ear against them. Icon of Coil’s "Serenity Is the Devil" belongs proudly to the latter category - a futurepop cornerstone that never really left the dance floor, even when the bodies did.

Now, twenty-five years later, Metropolis Records resurrects it in a remastered double-LP edition, translucent orange like the warning light on a club exit you’re too euphoric to notice. And yes, the sound is slicker, louder, shinier - a bit like someone ran a microfiber cloth over a cyborg.

Icon of Coil’s origin story is almost mythological in the dark-electro world: Andy LaPlegua, who later unleashed Combichrist on the world, starts a project in ’97. Sebastian Komor joins in ’99, Christian Lund in 2000. The trio builds a sonic engine designed for sweaty basements and black-clad crowds who take their synths emotional and their beats punitive. The result: a debut that shot up the German alternative charts and helped cement futurepop as its own neon-lit kingdom.

Listening to this remaster in 2025 is a peculiar pleasure - like opening an old box of club flyers and realizing half of them still smell faintly of hairspray. Tracks such as “Regret” and “Shallow Nation” remain unreasonably catchy, balancing angst and uplift the way only Scandinavian EBM could back then: serious themes carried by melodies that border on pop, delivered with that signature LaPlegua baritone, half-brooding, half-inviting, always ready to lead you somewhere vaguely dangerous.

The production touch-ups don’t fundamentally change the album’s DNA. The kicks still hit with that early-2000s determination - before “compression wars” were a term and after everyone discovered sidechain. The synth leads have that chrome sheen, equal parts melancholy and propulsion, like a city skyline reflected in rain puddles. And “Floorkiller” still does what it says on the tin: ten minutes of unabashed club intent, big boots stomping in unison.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the inclusion of “SEC FOUR”, previously unreleased - a small reward for longtime devotees, an archival whisper from a past that still thinks the future is blue, silver, and slightly menacing.

Is the album a masterpiece? Depends on whom you ask. Fans will still swear it changed their molecular structure. Skeptics will say it’s dated. They’re both right. That’s the charm: "Serenity Is the Devil" is a relic of a very specific era - a time when people earnestly believed in the emotional depth of vocoders, when synth pads felt like salvation, and when dancing felt like participating in the mythology of machines.

But give it time - preferably around 5 minutes and 26 seconds, i.e. the length of “Activate” - and the album’s magic returns. Not because it’s timeless, but because it’s proudly of its time, and somehow that honesty feels refreshing now.

This remaster doesn’t just polish an artifact. It reminds us of a world where the future sounded synthetic and strangely hopeful, and where a Norwegian trio could make entire rooms believe that melancholy and euphoria were simply two endpoints of the same flickering circuit.

The devil may be in the title, but the serenity comes from dancing.